[plug] Mailbox speeds (was [OT] Gmail Opinions)

[Bernard Blackham]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 05:44:23PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> That's one of my major complaints about mutt.  Even on relatively fast
> modern IDE discs, it can take the better part of a minute to open a
> large folder.  I'd love to see it be O(1) for opening a folder;
> there's no technical reason why it can't be with a little caching.

It would still be O(n), as presumably your cache/index would get
larger as you grew more messages. Even still, I agree that it could
still be done much faster ...

I've been meaning to give Dovecot 1.0-test16 a twirl, released two
days ago. (It's still fairly beta, definitely not for production
systems). Amongst other things, the author Timo notes:

----
So, the biggest change in 1.0-test15 is a new fully functional
superfast mbox code. [...]

Superfast as in:
 - Syncing and modifying the mbox is done in one integrated loop, no
   more passing through the whole mbox multiple times.
 - If we know the mbox is synced and we need to modify it, we
   directly jump to the message(s) needing modification and change
   only them. This means that with upcoming Dovecot LDA the mbox
   never needs to be fully parsed. As long as you're not expunging
   old messages, mboxes with sizes of even gigabytes should be no
   problem.
----

The Dovecot LDA (Local Delivery Agent) he refers to, will update
indexes upon delivery, hence be super fast for delivery & reading of
mail.

It's on my list of things to try out after exams next week.

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham <bernard at blackham dot com dot au>