153: Why does Gnus hang for a long time when posting?

  David Lawrence <tale@uunet.uu.net> explains:

    The problem is almost always interaction between NNTP and C News.  NNTP
    POST asks C News's inews to not background itself but rather hang
    around and give its exit status so it knows whether the post was
    successful.  (That wait will on some systems not return the exit status
    of the waited for job is a different sort of problem.)  It ends up
    taking a long time because inews is calling relaynews, which often
    waits for another relaynews to free the lock on the news system so it
    can file the article.

    My preferred solution is to change inews to not call relaynews, but
    rather use newsspool.  This loses some error-catching functionality,
    but is for the most part safe as inews will detect a lot of the errors
    on its own.  The C News folks have sped up inews, too, so speed should
    look better to most folks as that update propagates around.