On Wed, 21 Jun 2000 01:33:31 EDT, Bennett Todd wrote:
>Back to our muttons, the above performance discussion focused on
>opening the folder. Once it's open, mutt has built an in-memory data
>structure describing the messages, and either their offsets in the
>mbox file, or the filenames where they can be directly accessed in
>the Maildir. So most operations are fast. Until it comes time to
>save changes; then deletions require rewriting an entire mbox, while
>they just require deleting the specific message files in a Maildir,
>so Maildirs can be way faster there.
Hmm, to the extent that MH format is like Maildir, my experience
is contrary to your claim that saving changes is faster in a
one-message-per-file format. I found that closing mutt took
several times longer with MH than with mbox. My suspicioun was
that mutt updates the access times for every message file so it
can detect new messages, and this updating is slow (at least on
Solaris).
>And then there are the manipulations outside of the MUA. Maildir
>wins there, at least for me. I _love_ the simplicity and reliability
>of delivering to it; it's trivial to do so very safely and robustly
>even from a portable Bourne Shell script. Scanning mailboxes for
>messages matching patterns is a piece o' cake with Unix shell tools,
>likewise migrating older messages to archival folders, indexing them
>with a full-text search tool like e.g. Glimpse, etc.
Yes, that's a big win for one-message-per-file formats.
-Brett
__________________________________________________________________________
Brett Coon - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.rahul.net/brett
Coach Norman Dale: Stick to 'em like chewing gum. By the end of the
game I want to know what flavor they are.
[196] "Hoosiers" (1986)
