My previous column took a look at the Mac newsreader choices in general, without delving
into much detail. In the coming weeks, I’ll be peeling away the layers and exploring the
complexity of the most popular clients, starting with the programs I use most often.
I use several newsreader clients on an almost daily basis, depending on what kind of job I
need to do, and what kind of group I’m reading. I also may choose a different client
depending on the connection. A slow client (such as Microsoft Entourage) on a dialup is
just too frustrating to tolerate.
For low-traffic groups (for me a low-traffic group has only about 150 messages at any one
time on the server in any one group) where I do not want to grab any binary data, I often
use the newsreader functions built in to Microsoft Entourage. Not a great client by any
measure, but it does make it easy for me to keep my email and news messages in the same
database. Because I eventually archive all my outgoing mail into a FileMaker database, it
is helpful for me to keep all my outgoing message traffic in one program.
But when I want to scan groups with hundreds or thousands of messages posted each day, I
use MT-Newswatcher. I also use YA-Newswatcher, but I tend to gravitate toward MT because
it can open multiple connections from multiple servers simultaneously.
Opening up multiple connections is like slicing a pie, you can keep slicing and the number
of slices will increase, but that does not make the pie any larger. For example, assume
you have a cable modem with a maximum of bandwidth of 200 KB per second, if you are able
to open up 4 connections, each connection would be limited to 50 KB/s. But even if the pie
doesn’t get any larger, it can be served more quickly.
Why? Two reasons that add up to being able to work faster. Because its rare to actually
use all your available bandwidth with a single connection. And because it is possible to
do several things at once, such as reading message headers in one group while downloading
binaries in the background.
Users with high-speed Internet access can speed up file downloads by utilizing multiple
connections. To download as much information as quickly as possible, check out
MT-Newswatcher’s task list window: it displays an estimate of the current download speed
when extracting multiple binaries. If the speed is consistently lower than what you see
when downloading a file in the Web browser, try opening up a second connection. And keep
in mind that while MT-Newswatcher can handle more than two connections at a time, many
news services will limit the number of concurrent connections you can establish on their
servers.
As for doing more than one thing at a time, this is what I really love about MT. I can
usually keep three tasks going at the same time. First, I download the headers from two
groups. Once the first group is finished, I start scanning its headers. If I find
something I want to save, I can go ahead and save it to disk in the background and go on
to read the second group. By alternately leapfrogging between two groups, the connection
can always be actively moving information, and I don’t have to wait and watch as each set
of headers is fetched.
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"Multiple Newsreaders and Multiple Connections"
