[Stephan Whelan]

Fastforward,

To confirm my suspicion, try commenting out line 828 of newnews.pl.
It currently reads

find_emails($from, sub { my($e,$orig) = @_; $email = $e->format; } );

Hmm - I commented out that line, there seems to be a slight increase in speed but not really anything significant.

I've been watch what is going on with my server and i'm wondering if it is something to do with the way mysql is setup on my system...as i've said i'm running it on a Cobalt RAQ4i that people in these forums seem to have mixed feelings about...whilst studying what is going on with the mysql processing during the long periods the following processes seem to spend a long time:

INSERT LOW_PRIORITY IGNORE INTO usenet_article_loader SELECT DISTINCT a.newsgroup, a.forum, a.msgid

The state it seems to be in a lot is:

Copying to tmp table

Which leads me to believe that mysql isn't perfoming well. This is strange as I have 512 Mb of RAM with 30 GB HDD - I followed instructions on changing some of the sartup parameters for mysql but nothing really seems to have a great impact.

Any suggestions?