From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/42470 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: db-backed mail back end Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 12:50:41 -0500 Organization: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt, human pyramid? 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 1035177705 11718 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 05:21:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 05:21:45 +0000 (UTC) Return-Path: Original-Received: (qmail 5689 invoked from network); 23 Jan 2002 17:53:07 -0000 Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu (mail@129.7.128.13) by mastaler.com with SMTP; 23 Jan 2002 17:53:07 -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 16TRY6-0004ub-00; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 11:51:02 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Wed, 23 Jan 2002 11:50:56 -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 LAA10351 for ; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 11:50:46 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 5643 invoked by alias); 23 Jan 2002 17:50:45 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 5638 invoked from network); 23 Jan 2002 17:50:45 -0000 Original-Received: from multivac.student.cwru.edu (HELO multivac.cwru.edu) (qmailr@129.22.96.25) by gnus.org with SMTP; 23 Jan 2002 17:50:45 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 22916 invoked by uid 500); 23 Jan 2002 17:51:03 -0000 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 Mail-Followup-To: ding@gnus.org Original-Lines: 27 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090005 (Oort Gnus v0.05) Emacs/20.7 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:42470 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:42470 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote: > Perhaps the question should be restated as such: > > 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. :-) Unless the mail backend will directly access a raw disk device, I think that's still not quite the right question. The backend will use some particular software interface for storage - maybe the filesystem, maybe SQL, whatever. Making mail fast means making the implementation behind that storage interface fast. This is not a Gnus problem, or at least not entirely a Gnus problem. Just because Gnus seems slow, it doesn't mean it's Gnus's fault or that Gnus is the right place to try to fix it. If *your* filesystem is slow, *you* should switch to a different filesystem. (E.g., ReiserFS is designed to deal with large directories. Maybe XFS or JFS would also do well; I dunno.) Gnus has a choice of interfaces, but not of implementations behind them. The best we can do is to choose an interface that *allows* an implementation meeting certain performance criteria, or possibly to choose an interface where there are known to be widely-available implementations meeting certain criteria. paul