Hi Nick, > The local read test really seems to indicate that it's not the database > backend that is controlling performance when switching folders here. It is > presumable network communication with Google's imap servers. And that > presumably means that I can't do much about it, or can I?
I can confirm this. If you have a big mailbox (my "All Mail" contains ~150,000 messages), then the Google IMAP server is very slow. I've checked this with Thunderbird and the result is mostly the same. TB opens the box very fast and then it takes a long time to update the header cache. The IMAP protocol itself causes this, because it needs to synchronize the folder. The bigger a folder is the longer this process takes. I solved this problem for me with offlineimap and archivemail. I don't need the All Mail folder since I use labels for all my stuff and mailing lists. So it results in different Maildirs on my PC which are synchronized by offlineimap in the background. Older mail is archived by archivemail in gzipped mboxes. That works great. :) Jonny
