* [EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > I recently moved to maildir/Evolution, but Evolution is still somewhat > unstable. So I finally got around to be a Mutt user. I have to say > it's love at first sight. > > One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to speed up the opening > of very large mailboxes. My debian-users mailbox contains some 3500 > messages. It takes about 60 seconds to open. > > Are there any tricks to speed this up, some caching mechanism or > something. I'm already using ReiserFS and maildir.
Maildir is slower at being opened; the simple act of opening a file, scanning the first few bytes, then closing it 3500 times is always going to be slower than simply opening one file and seeking through it, unless your filesystem is really incredibly good at organising it to minimise seeking and give a miniscule overhead to the extra syscalls. That's without mentioning having to take directory listings of two directories beforehand. The solutions are: 1. Switch to mbox and trade off individual mail modification speed and corruption resistance for initial opening speed. 2. Use a maildir caching patch to limit scanning of new messages to operations on a dbm. 3. Make use of the low cost of moving messages from the start of the maildir to archive old messages. Leave your working folder as maildir with a maximum of a couple of days mails and keep mbox archives or so. 4. Find a filesystem which keeps lots of small files in the same dir consolidated together with the metainformation it needs to find them to cut down seeks and small reads. 5. Get tonnes of memory and try to keep as much as possible of it cached. On FreeBSD this tends to cut opening time to about 10% slower than mbox. I do 1, but could conceivably do 2, 3 and 5 in future. -- Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.aagh.net/ - Lackland's Laws: (1) Never be first. (2) Never be last. (3) Never volunteer for anything
