Re: Maildir performance & mutt

["N. Thomas" <nthomas@cise.ufl.edu>]

* Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> [2002-04-12 00:25:00 -0700]:
> 
> I've switched to maildir, um, well, I forget why.
> 
> With 1000+ messages (and 5000+ is pretty easily attainable), performance
> on opening a folder sucks.
> 
> Is there any way to speed this up?

There was a thread about this recently on mutt-users. Here is good
explanation of the available solutions from Thomas Hurst:

> > 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.

Some people use solution #2, Michael Elkins' header caching patch for
maildir:

   http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/mutt/

and they have been very satisfied with the results.

I believe you need to patch it against the cvs development branch of Mutt,
so if you are against that sort of thing, just wait till it gets merged in
and released, but I don't know how long that will take.

-- 
N. Thomas
nthomas@cise.ufl.edu
Etiamsi occiderit me, in ipso sperabo


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