Re: spam.el is a bit aggressive loading/saving spam-stat data

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Fri, 07 Mar 2003, billw@wolfram.com wrote:
> It takes roughly 20-30 seconds to load my spam-stat file.  Is this a
> reasonable duration, or am I doing something wrong?  It's far too
> long to wait at each new mail retrieval.

Alex Schroeder, the spam-stat.el maintainer, might be able to answer.
Your stat file may be simply too large, and I don't think Alex has
written stats expiration code.

For large files like the stats database, even with expiration there
may be too much data, especially over NFS.  It would be nice if
spam-stat.el could use a persistent connection to a SQL database, or a
local database file (Berkeley DB, for instance).

As far as the SQL goes, I can write a simple Perl daemon that
maintains a connection to a database table and understands the basic
commands spam-stat.el needs (basically just read word stats/store word
stats).  I don't know if there's something within Emacs that could
help, so we don't have to have an external utility.

> Would it be reasonable to load the spam-stat file only when gnus
> first starts, then save it only when quitting gnus or at some other
> rare event during which I'm not waiting eagerly for something?

You could remove spam-stat-maybe-load from gnus-get-top-new-news-hook,
it's in gnus-startup-hook already if you have set spam-use-stat when
loading spam.el.

Ted