On March 15, 2004 at 16:49, "Lyle Schofield" wrote: > Side question -- are there any practical limits to the number of > messages MHonArc can convert into an archive? I've been testing in > batches of 350, and it only takes a few minutes on my laptop. But, if I > try to dump thousands of messages in there will I hit some limit of what > can be processed? Thanks in advance.
Scaling can be a problem if your resources are limitied. When MHonArc processes an archive, all the meta-information of the archive is loaded, so archive updates for large archives will slow down over time. Therefore, doing real-time updates (i.e. add messages right as they are received) of large archives should not be done to avoid bottleneck problems. The general solution for dealing with a large archive is to break it down into smaller archives denoted by fixed time periods (like each week, month, or year). The mharc project, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/> provides such capabilites, and other users have developed their own (search the list archives). If you are archives will grow to an indefinite size, then I highly recommend going with the smaller sub-archive approach. --ewh P.S. I have heard of users that have had up to 60,000 messages in a single archive. But I think you need some decent hardware and RAM to effectively work with such a beast.
