Re: Gnus vs Wanderlust

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> colin.rafferty@morganstanley.com writes:
>> 1. It does not cache summary layout information.  When it builds a
>>    summary, it has to start from scratch.
>
> Is this actually a problem?  Judging from what I see, the great bulk of
> the time is _not_ in summary generation, but rather getting info from
> the server (which is where the sparse-range problems show up too).

Well, I found that Wanderlust, which seems to cache and incrementally
update summaries, builds the summary buffer for a large (> 10000
messages) IMAP group much faster than Gnus does for the same IMAP group
... at least after the first time I enter the group when all the initial
summary building and caching takes place.

I understand that Wanderlust doesn't do as much of the fancy stuff that
Gnus does, but I am another person who doesn't use those features in my
IMAP groups.

Perhaps this behavior could become a group-specific option in Gnus
... ???


> [My computer's pretty slow by contemporary standards too -- a 450MHz
> pentium]
>
> I suppose one could try to cache and incrementally update summaries, but
> summary-generation is already so fast, even for very large groups, that
> it might make more sense to investigate whether it could be made even
> faster (maybe even with some new emacs primitives).

Well, I have empirical evidence that caching and incrementally updating
summaries can indeed make the entry into a large IMAP group considerably
faster.


> Having `in between' summary generation might be nice too, especially
> when just updating a summary buffer with M-g -- for instance, delete and
> regenerate all threads where anything changed (message disappeared,
> message added ...) would probably be very fast, as in a large group,
> this would avoid regenerating most of the summary.

Agreed.  In fact, this is probably closer to what Wanderlust does.


-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com
 God bless you.