Read again, I used slrnpull's cache. Mail was fast with Mu4e and Mairix. GNUS with slrn, not much. I have tons of articles from comp.* and some alt.* related groups. People loves to talk at comp.misc and comp.arch.

Also GNUS' caching it's really slow compared to slrn. Yes, I know, Elisp vs C, but even with native compilation it was excruciatingly slow. I've seen bytecoded TCL back in the day running really fast for these tasks.