Re: the correct way to read a big directory? Mutt?
Hm...
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:56:48AM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 04:12:15PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
> > Le quintidi 5 floréal, an CCXXIII, Vincent Lefevre a écrit :
> > > Now I wonder whether the use of the hash by ext3 is a good idea...
> > >
> > > Alternatively, I suppose that a SSD disk could improve things.
> >
> > Well, filesystems can not be optimized for every use.
>
> Ext3 dates from 2001, and is an incremental update to the ext2 design from
> 1993. Large-scale storage on flash devices was very uncommon then, and the
> rise of modern SSDs didn't start until around 2008 iirc.
>
> > Having myriads of small files has always been a bad idea anyway, it trashes
> > the inode and dentries cache, it costs extra disk bandwidth (because you can
> > not read half a sector at the end of the file) and latency (because of all
> > the seeks, even when reading in order, it will be more fragmented than a
> > single file), etc. Of course, nowadays, huge RAM and SSD will mitigate the
> > issue.
>
> Mail storage is a lose-lose situation, really. Maildir improves the performance
> and reliability of parallel operations on a mailbox versus mbox, but is less
> space efficient precicely because of the metadata overhead, especially for
> large mailboxes. One should keep high-read boxes in Mailidir and low-read,
> large-size archival mailboxes in mbox, potentially compressed. The archivemail
> tool can assist with moving one to the other.
>
> > It is a tragedy that a standard, robust and efficient format for mailboxes
> > was never designed and adopted.
>
> It's a tragedy that many such standards were invented :)
Obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/927/
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
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