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#### 11.5.1 Slow/Expensive Connection

If you run Emacs on a machine locally, and get your news from a machine over some very thin strings, you want to cut down on the amount of data Gnus has to get from the server.

`gnus-read-active-file`
  Set this to `nil`, which will inhibit Gnus from requesting the entire active file from the server. This file is often very large. You also have to set `gnus-check-new-newsgroups` and `gnus-check-bogus-newsgroups` to `nil` to make sure that Gnus doesn't suddenly decide to fetch the active file anyway.
`gnus-nov-is-evil`
  Usually this one must always be `nil` (which is the default). If, for example, you wish to not use NOV (see Terminology) with the `nntp` back end (see Crosspost Handling), set `nntp-nov-is-evil` to a non-`nil` value instead of setting this. But you normally do not need to set `nntp-nov-is-evil` since Gnus by itself will detect whether the NNTP server supports NOV. Anyway, grabbing article headers from the NNTP server will not be very fast if you tell Gnus not to use NOV.

  As the variables for the other back ends, there are `nndiary-nov-is-evil`, `nndir-nov-is-evil`, `nnfolder-nov-is-evil`, `nnimap-nov-is-evil`, `nnml-nov-is-evil`, and `nnspool-nov-is-evil`. Note that a non-`nil` value for `gnus-nov-is-evil` overrides all those variables.