I notice that upldating RSS feeds takes much more time compared to newsboat. To benchmark this I eliminate the network effects 1. I fetch all web feeds in local XML files. 2. I use a web server running on localhost 3. I use the localhost URLs in Claws Mail So a test with 85 URLs shows: Claws Mail: 11-50 seconds (the smaller time is when feeds have recently been updated) newsboat (regardless of frequency of reloads) takes 1-2 secs: $ time newsboat -x reload real 0m2.321s user 0m0.526s sys 0m0.251s Tested with version Claws Mail 3.17.4git95 and newsboat 2.11.1 It would be good to optimize the speed of refreshing if possible because with "real" (not locally cached) feeds the situation is actually far worse. Perhaps refreshing feeds using parallel threads rather than sequentially. Disclaimer: I don't know if newsboat uses threads but it is much much faster.