On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, Oscar del Rio wrote:
However, on a fast connection, webmail "feels" slow compared to Thunderbird
or even Outlook, perhaps because it does not have the data cached locally.
I wonder if a true IMAP client would have the same feeling of slowness
(I have not tried alpine much)
Alpine does not maintain any cache from one session to the next, but it
maintains a cache for the current session. The algorithm is something
like this:
(1) if desired data is in the cache, go to step (3)
(2) load the desired data into the cache
(3) access the desired data from the cache
There's actually a bit more to step (2). Both Alpine and the underlying
c-client library try to guess what is likely to be accessed next, and do
some pre-fetching based upon those guesses. This wins because the data
needed to paint the index is relatively small, and thus aggregating
multiple loads is faster than doing multiple loads.
Thus, although you will never have the intolerable slowness that you get
with Thunderbird, from time to time you may see Alpine "stutter" briefly
as it hits a cache fault and has to load data into the cache. Barring a
network or system failure, you won't notice the stutter on a fast link.
Recently I learned the Shift-Delete key shortcut in Thunderbird that
deletes without copying to Trash. It is a real time saver!
Does it do the delete-expunge model, or does it just delete?
Undelete is really important, at least for me.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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