Re: balsa, and other graphics mailer are slow

[Matthew Guenther <guentherm asme org>]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 09:45:16AM +0100, Olaf Fr?czyk wrote:
> 
> On 2001.01.19 06:00:55 +0100 Matthew Guenther wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Just out of curiosity, why don't you guys split your mail into separate
> > mailboxes? Or archive older mail? I can't imagine any program would
> > handle a mailbox of that size gracefully...
> > 
> > 25 MB! Yikes! :-)
> > 
> 
> I cannot agree with you:
> 
> 1. The stupid MS Exchange works very nice with 290 MB !!!! mailbox.
> My boss has this one :) 
> Hardware was Cyrix P150+ 48 MB RAM, now is Duron 700, 64MB RAM and
> no big difference in speed reading mail. The number of messages in
> inbox is about 2400, and in sentbox is 1600. Opening this profile
> takes about 2-3 seconds !! On Cyrix, as I remember it was not more
> than 2 times slower. And ... this file is accesses from samba server
> over 100 Mbit ethernet. Opening message takes very small time 0.2 s.
> 
> 2. If I get 5 mails, every 5 MB big, should I create a new mailbox ?!

True, you shouldn't have to.  I was imagining you were getting a large
volume of smaller mail, as this is what I have from all the different
mailing lists I'm subscribed to.  However I don't end up with large folders
because I can sort them all over.

> 3. May be an optional indexed mailbox is a good way? Balsa coud move
> new mail form /var/spool/mail/xxx to this mailbox. And this mailbox
> could be compatibile with other MUAs (I don't now in what way the
> mail is kept by them, but I'm sure, that a big part of them use
> indexed mailboxes). And flock locking, and ...., and ... ;)

I think if we were to do something like this it would end up being an index
file that was loaded alongside the mailbox.  It's doable, but probably a
significant number of programmer-hours (of which we are already in short
supply).

MBG

-- 
  Matthew Guenther                       When you're in command, command.
  guentherm@asme.org                     		-- Admiral Nimitz
  http://www.attcanada.ca/~mguenthe/