On 2015-04-22 23:28:46 -0500, David Wright wrote: > Quoting Vincent Lefevre (vinc...@vinc17.net): > > On 2015-04-21 12:47:14 -0500, David Wright wrote: > > > Quoting Vincent Lefevre (vinc...@vinc17.net): > > > > This mailbox is constantly open in a Mutt running in screen (in > > > > read-only mode). I often read it, and I modify it from time to time, > > > > either by adding new messages in the usual way, or by modifying some > > > > header of existing messages with some tool of mine (in which case, I > > > > restart Mutt to take the changes into account). > > > > > > I guess I find it hard (not knowing what all these emails are) to get > > > my head around needing an email-style random access to 145k emails in > > > one folder. > > > > I can then do any filtering I like to search for an old e-mail > > instead of having to look at several folders individually. > > You have more of these folders with thousands of emails in them?
Only one. This is the goal: store old e-mail at only one place. In the past, I was using several folders, but this was impracticable because for mail messages would naturally belong to several folders, and some searches (such as getting all messages from/to some e-mail address) needed a search in all folders. I've used tagging instead of folders since 2003[*], and this is much more practical. [*] At that time, this archive mailbox was much smaller, with something like 20k messages. > > No, I don't use caches (the header cache is not enabled and the > > ~/.mutt-cache directory doesn't exist). > > My fault; I had forgotten that I myself added these settings to .muttrc. > After all, that was probably in 1998. > > In which case, if you want to know how come mutt is so fast, take a > look at the source. Just to mention one optimisation I would consider: > slurp the directory and sort the entries by inode. Open the files in > inode order. > And another: it's probably faster to slurp bigger chunks of each file > (with an intelligent guess of the best buffer size) and use a fast > search for \nMessage-ID rather than reading and checking line by line. I'll try to do some tests, but I would say that this doesn't matter since what takes all the time is the I/O: when everything is in the (Linux-level) cache, both Mutt and my tool take a few seconds. > > Only once for indexing. This is persistent after reboots and not > > used by Mutt at all. > > No, I wasn't expecting mutt to use mairix. But I thought you might be > using it. Otherwise, why do you index them? I use mairix when I need a "body" search first, otherwise such a search would be awfully slow with Mutt. Then I can open the generated folder with Mutt, and try to do more filtering to find what I want. > I also wondered what the problem would be with putting the thousands > of emails in a general purpose database. But Mutt can't use such a database. > Don't they search and retrieve faster than perl scripts? I use Perl scripts only to update the mailbox (the tags), not for searching. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150423082200.gb24...@xvii.vinc17.org
