Re: IMAP vs nnml ? (was: Palm and Gnus)

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) wrote:
> I wonder if nnmaildir might be even faster than nnml?  I noticed some
> talking about nnmaildir caching stuff in main memory.  Paul?

I've been told nnmaildir feels faster, and that was even before the
new marks stuff was added to nnml; I can only imagine that would make
nnml slower.

nnmaildir does cache things in memory where (AFAIK) other backends do
not.  It's possible that this is not such a great idea, but if you've
got the memory, it probably speeds things up a little.  If you don't
have the memory, you can turn off some of the caching.

I would not be surprised to learn that nnmaildir is much slower on a
block-structured filesystem.  ReiserFS (which is not block-structured)
handles lots of small files quickly and space-efficiently, and
nnmaildir takes advantage of that.

All this is subjective/speculative, though.  I haven't done any
measurements.


paul