[OT] Gmane/Tunderbird users: is g.c.p.general too big?

[Steve Holden]

Sorry about this almost off-topic post, but I am guessing there must be
other readers of this group who use Thunderbird (in my case 1.0.2) to
access it as gmane.comp.general.python.

I'm currently showing 344,548 articles in the group due to the gmane
policy of permanent retention, and lately it seems to have started
taking forever to switch from mailboxes to the newsgroup. Furthermore,
the Thunderbird process's memory usage climbs from ~30MB reading mail to
over 200MB reading the newsgroup.

Has anyone else noticed this, or is it specific to my setup? Does anyone
have a solution?

regards
Steve