From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/25187 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Hannu Koivisto Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: overview file access when spooling and nnml/nnimap performance Date: 22 Sep 1999 16:48:54 +0300 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: <877lljawft.fsf@senstation.vvf.fi> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035162619 12704 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 01:10:19 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 01:10:19 +0000 (UTC) Return-Path: Original-Received: from bart.math.uh.edu (bart.math.uh.edu [129.7.128.48]) by sclp3.sclp.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA01281 for ; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 09:51:46 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu (lists@Sina.HPC.UH.EDU [129.7.3.5]) by bart.math.uh.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id IAB11424; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 08:51:42 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Wed, 22 Sep 1999 08:51:48 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (root@sclp3.sclp.com [204.252.123.139]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA28042 for ; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 08:51:39 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from senstation.vvf.fi (senstation.vvf.fi [195.74.10.211]) by sclp3.sclp.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA01271 for ; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 09:49:37 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from azure by senstation.vvf.fi with local (Exim 3.03 #1 (Debian)) id 11TmlS-0001Ch-00; Wed, 22 Sep 1999 16:48:54 +0300 Original-To: ding@gnus.org Original-Lines: 32 User-Agent: Gnus/5.070096 (Pterodactyl Gnus v0.96) Emacs/20.3 Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:25187 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:25187 Greetings, I'm looking for ways to handle my mail (and news, but that's not relevant now) faster without getting new hardware. I have almost always used nnml because it has scaled better than anything else, but nowadays I'm not quite satisfied with it either. Getting new mail from the spool, even few (5--20) articles, is much slower than it should, IMHO, be on my PII/266 Linux machine with spools (I split mail externally with procmail) and nnml folders both on UW-SCSI disk. Also entering groups with large amount of articles is quite slow, but I believe there is really nothing that can be done for it as Elisp is probably simply too slow for reading the relevant information from disk and generating the summary buffer. So, I started to think about what happens when Gnus gets new mail from the spool. What seems a real overkill to me is that it seems to read the whole overview file for each group for which there is mail to memory, do some magic (that I didn't quite understand and which probably is the problem here for me thinking this is an overkill), add new lines and then write it back to disk. (Please correct if I'm wrong about this.) I.e. if I get even just few new mails to several groups, Gnus ends up reading like 5+Mb data from disk, fiddling with it and writing it back. Perhaps this can't be avoided, in which case, I thought, some sort of database solution for storing articles would perhaps be the right direction. This brings us to nnimap. How's its performance with some good IMAP server (does such things exist)? Somehow I doubt this, but as someone suggested going for IMAP when someone else was asking for some sort of database-backend, I'm a bit curious. -- Hannu