nnmaildir takes progressively longer to exit group

nnmaildir takes progressively longer to exit group

[David Wuertele]

When I didn't have much mail, nnmaildir was a great solution.  Now
that I have tens of thousands of messages, nnmaildir takes as long as
5 MINUTES to exit a group.  It is getting unusable and frustrating.

I keep my mail on a USB-2 drive formatted reiserfs.  When the USB-2
drive is connected (and only when connected), fetchmail automatically
gets mail and delivers it to multiple maildirs on that drive.  My
.gnus file says:

(setq gnus-select-method '(nnmaildir "" (directory "~/mail/maildirs")
                                        (create-directory ".")))
(setq gnus-use-cache t
      gnus-cacheable-groups ".*" 
      gnus-uncacheable-groups "\\`nnmaildir[:+]")

I have noticed that when leaving the group "dave-gnus@bfnet.com",
EVERY ONE OF THE 14843 MARK FILES in

  ~/mail/maildirs/dave-gnus@bfnet.com/.nnmaildir/marks/read/*

gets modified.  Is that normal!?!

Is there anything I can do to speed up nnmaildir performance?

I have looked into dovecot, but I wasn't able to figure out how to
teach it about my existing maildir structure.

Thanks,
Dave

Re: nnmaildir takes progressively longer to exit group

[Kai Grossjohann]

David Wuertele <dave-gnus@bfnet.com> writes:

> When I didn't have much mail, nnmaildir was a great solution.  Now
> that I have tens of thousands of messages, nnmaildir takes as long as
> 5 MINUTES to exit a group.  It is getting unusable and frustrating.

Do you have total-expire on?

What happens if you M-: (remove-hook 'gnus-summary-prepare-exit-hook
'gnus-summary-expire-articles) RET, then exit a group?  Does that
help?

Back some years ago, when I was using total-expire, I used to have
this in ~/.gnus and then, every day, before going to lunch, I would
issue C-c C-M-x in the Group buffer.  (I had a different keybinding
for this, though.)

Kai

Re: nnmaildir takes progressively longer to exit group

[Paul Jarc]

David Wuertele <dave-gnus@bfnet.com> wrote:
> I have noticed that when leaving the group "dave-gnus@bfnet.com",
> EVERY ONE OF THE 14843 MARK FILES in
>
>   ~/mail/maildirs/dave-gnus@bfnet.com/.nnmaildir/marks/read/*
>
> gets modified.  Is that normal!?!

It should be only one file, with many hard links.  (Use ls -li to
check.)  Links may be created or removed when you exit a group, so the
hard link count and the ctime may change, but I would expect the mtime
to remain the same.  Exactly what do you see changing?


paul