From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/42460 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Simon Josefsson Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: db-backed mail back end Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 09:52:47 +0100 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: <87g04x7w4q.fsf@inanna.rimspace.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035177693 11501 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 05:21:33 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 05:21:33 +0000 (UTC) Return-Path: Original-Received: (qmail 14819 invoked from network); 23 Jan 2002 08:58:29 -0000 Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu (mail@129.7.128.13) by mastaler.com with SMTP; 23 Jan 2002 08:58:29 -0000 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 16TJBc-0002a4-00; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 02:55:16 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Wed, 23 Jan 2002 02:55:11 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (qmailr@sclp3.sclp.com [209.196.61.66]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id CAA08685 for ; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 02:55:00 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 14755 invoked by alias); 23 Jan 2002 08:54:52 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 14750 invoked from network); 23 Jan 2002 08:54:51 -0000 Original-Received: from 178.230.13.217.in-addr.dgcsystems.net (HELO yxa.extundo.com) (217.13.230.178) by gnus.org with SMTP; 23 Jan 2002 08:54:51 -0000 Original-Received: from localhost.localdomain (yxa.extundo.com [217.13.230.178]) (authenticated bits=0) by yxa.extundo.com (8.12.2/8.12.2) with ESMTP id g0N8sUXP002930 for ; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 09:54:30 +0100 Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen's message of "Wed, 23 Jan 2002 01:36:19 +0100") Mail-Copies-To: nobody Original-Lines: 35 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090006 (Oort Gnus v0.06) Emacs/21.2.50 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:42460 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:42460 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen writes: > Daniel Pittman writes: > >> Gain? For me, the biggest pain with Gnus right now is that there are >> some scalability issues. I got sick of losing information that had been >> on mailing lists, so I stopped expiring mail a couple of years ago. > > A db doesn't necessarily give you any performance gain. If you're not > careful with how you set things up, you can get arbitrarily awful db > performance (and I should know, since I've been Oracling a lot these > past years. :-)) I agree -- a db backend will most likely be slower than nnml. NNML is a datbase specialized for its purpose, a generic database will not be faster. ...unless the backend interface design changes in the process, which would make some speed improvements possible. > If we were to design a mail back end that's supposed to scale to > several hundred thousands of messages in thousands of groups -- how > would we do that? Perhaps somebody has pondered this question > before. :-) Don't compute things that you don't need. Entering a group should be a call to `(switch-to-buffer (generate-new-buffer (format "*Summary %s*" group))'. Populating the view should be incremental and asynchronous. Threading should optionally be pushed down into the backend (IMAP supports server-side threading, a database backend could as well), with utility threading functionality in Gnus. Etc. Same goes for the group buffer, btw. It should be displayed immediately, and updating status on groups should happen asynchronously.