Re: huge mailboxes

[Olaf Frączyk <olaf cbk poznan pl>]

On 2001.07.22 15:05:09 +0200 Yachar Tajahmady wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I'm using balsa and I'm another fan of mailing lists ;-)
> But I'm wondering what you call "huge files".
> I'm currently having mboxes with more than 500 messages in it, and it
> takes
> no more than 1 second to open (the first time you load it).
> For info, I'm using a Pentium III 800 with 512 Mb RAM.
Hi,

So, you don't have BIG mailboxes ;)
Celeron 466, 384 MB RAM.

1. mailbox 2688 messages, 10 MB, - 5 seconds
2. mailbox 1958 messages, 8 MB, - 3 seconds
3. mailbox 3178 messages, 12 MB, - 6 seconds
4. mailbox 259 messages, 64 MB, - less than 1 second
5. mailbox 115 messages, 52 MB, - less than 1 second
6. mailbox 432 messages, 10 MB, - less than 1 second

So, it depends mostly on how much messages do you have. The total size of
mailbox is not so important, and indexing would help very much.

I wanted to move mail from our windows machines, to linux with balsa, but
people have mailboxes with many, many messages, and they open in Internet
Mail (WinNT) in 1-2 second - no more. So, they would kill me, if they were
to wait 5-20 seconds (approximation of amount messages they have in
mailboxes).(No 'search' option and not forwarding of attachments is another
reason.)

And, indexing should be as an addition to the mbox file, so there is access
from other mail readers too. I think, in xfmail it is done yhat way.

The second thing, about slowness... I have mentioned on this list, about
sending big messages. For example, a 7 MB message is encoded by balsa for
about 40 seconds (not including sending time), but with pine it takes 10
seconds (INCLUDING sending time).
About base64 encoding.
I took a look (very short ;) at the code, and I found, that this is done
with libmutt in send.c with no buffering, so every 3 bytes go to disk from
file to file (I could be wrong, if yes, please somebody to correct me). I
think that having a buffer for 10 KB would improve this very much (May be
1KB would be enough). And, maybe, there are other similiar problems, but I
didn't have time to look for them.
The only response from list was: "Don't send so big messages". I hope it
was a joke ;)

Best Regards,

Olaf