If you run Emacs on a machine locally, and get your news from a machine over some very thin strings, you want to cut down on the amount of data Gnus has to get from the server.
gnus-read-active-fileSet this to nil, which will inhibit Gnus from requesting the
entire active file from the server. This file is often very large. You
also have to set gnus-check-new-newsgroups and
gnus-check-bogus-newsgroups to nil to make sure that Gnus
doesn’t suddenly decide to fetch the active file anyway.
gnus-nov-is-evil ¶Usually this one must always be nil (which is the
default). If, for example, you wish to not use NOV
(see Terminology) with the nntp back end (see Crosspost Handling), set nntp-nov-is-evil to a non-nil value
instead of setting this. But you normally do not need to set
nntp-nov-is-evil since Gnus by itself will detect whether the
NNTP server supports NOV. Anyway, grabbing article
headers from the NNTP server will not be very fast if you tell
Gnus not to use NOV.
As the variables for the other back ends, there are
nndiary-nov-is-evil, nndir-nov-is-evil,
nnfolder-nov-is-evil, nnml-nov-is-evil, and
nnspool-nov-is-evil. Note that a non-nil value for
gnus-nov-is-evil overrides all those variables.