On Mon, 19 Jun 2000 20:59:23 +0200, Gerhard den Hollander wrote:
>>> I've converted my mailboxes to maildir once, it turned out to be
>>> slower than mbox, so I converted back to mbox now. Dunno about MH, but
>>> I'm guessing it's about the same speed as maildir since it resembles
>>> maildir.
>
>> are your files on a network?
>
>Actually, I think the problem is due to the huge number of files in your
>subdirs .. depending on the OS (w/ Linux I think the turn around point is
>between 1000 and 2000 entries per dir) soo many files in your directory
>makes all directory access slower ..
>sticking all files in a big folder will improve speed ..
>a lot of small files in a dir vs a big file containing a lot of small
>messages shows that the big file is faster
>(this is at least partly due to the fact that the caching helps ..)
>
>I haven't bothered doing much experiments with this, but on a few tests
>mbox format is the fastest (for me at least).
>
>And as clemens said, NFS (or whatever) will add to the bottle neck ..
In my case, the files are NFS mounted from a fairly overloaded
server, so file accesses are generally slow. I just tried
running mutt on my (NFS-mounted) inbox, and it took it about 5
minutes to open the folder and over 15 minutes to close it.
Clearly that's not usable. My folder is in MH format with 1090
messages, and another 1000 old messages (which I'm deleting as I
type this).
I copied the inbox directory to my local filesystem, and found
mutt startup times improved to about 3 seconds. Exit time
dropped to a little under 5 minutes, which is still painfully
slow, however.
What is mutt doing that takes so long? Does it rewrite every
single message file? At these speeds, I don't find it to be
usable for me. I'll try converting to mbox format and see how
much that helps.
WOW, I tried mbox format on a local directory, and quit time
dropped to about 10 seconds. I can live with that.
Putting the mbox file on our Mail NFS server slows down startups
by a couple seconds, while mutt exit time increases by minutes
(it's still trying to quit).
So, in summary, MH format is sloooow in mutt. NFS makes it far
slower, no doubt due to NFS write behavior, which I think is
compounded by me running mutt on a Solaris machine but the NFS
server being a Linux machine (I believe they have different NFS
write block sizes that causes Sun->Linux writes to be especially
slow).
-Brett
__________________________________________________________________________
Brett Coon - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.rahul.net/brett
Joker: Gotham City. Always brings a smile to my face.
[190] "Batman" (1989)
