For Gnus it was using the built-in fetchers like nnrss, which would block the Emacs process until downloads finished. Using a cron job to fetch RSS feeds avoided this, but it would still take a while to check for updates even from local files. This was around 2012, so Gnus might have improved since.
For Gnus it was using the built-in fetchers like nnrss, which would block the Emacs process until downloads finished. Using a cron job to fetch RSS feeds avoided this, but it would still take a while to check for updates even from local files. This was around 2012, so Gnus might have improved since.
FYI my current setup is described at http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-01-14-rss_to_maildir.html