Usenet Explorer

i just learned about xpat and am having some problems. sometimes when i run an xpat search, it will not even conduct the search at all(i guess it tries to access the newsservers but they don't respond because there is 0 network activity). other times(like the one in the screenshot) it will conduct a search but it won't pull in all the entries, it will sort of stop short and just hang with no network activity.


i searched for the string "metallica"(this is a complete dvdr post btw and for some reason only the pars showed up) in a.b.dvdr and it's been about 10 minutes so far and nothing has changed. is it supposed to take this long? i understand its a big group but if it's going to take this long, i'd might as well just get all the headers. i'm using 2 earthlink servers(one labeled east.earthlink.net, other labeled west.earthlink.net) and 1 verizon server(news.verizon.com). i don't have any other problems using the program besides this one. here is the screenshot:



http://home.earthlink.net/~drkillpatien ... tled-1.jpg

Yes, XPAT searches can take a very long time, and many times will not work altogether. I will say it is a fault of the server, but to give the server some credit it's more a fault of the XPAT command itself. It basically issues a search on the server side, and then has the server return the results to you. It's a very resource intensive task, and some servers have disabled it entirely. The more results and longer the retention on a particular server for the group you're searching the lengthier the search times.

A great alternative to XPAT searching is a newsgroup indexing service like Binnews which then allows you to download header files directly to NewsPro.

i apologize for posting this, it turns out it was my crappy dsl router was giving out. i bought a new one and havent had a problem since.