Re: opening speed for nnml groups

[Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>]

Indeed, 
+% mkdir test
+% time perl -e 'foreach $a (1..10000) { open FOO, ">test/$a" }'
1.490u 72.550s 1:31.65 80.7%    0+0k 0+0io 287pf+0w
+% time sync
0.000u 0.040s 0:00.21 19.0%     0+0k 0+0io 21pf+0w
+% time rm -rf test
0.200u 8.120s 0:09.26 89.8%     0+0k 0+0io 86pf+0w

But that's a p133 running linux, run of the mill 2G SCSI disks.

> Some of the NNML groups that I use for mailing lists have
> become quite large (over 1,000 messages) and have started to

Heh -- my mail.misc has 16000 files, mail.personal has 6500... and I
usually enter them with 33 or 99 (whatever is easiest to type) to read
new stuff, or maybe 300 or so if I want to search back a bit.  *That*
isn't slow... but when I hit $ to refile some spam, from mail.misc to
mail.spam (which only has 600 messages at the moment) it takes as long
as 5 to 10 seconds to recover.  I'd guess most of that has to do with
rewriting the 3.5M .overview file in mail.misc -- having 64M of RAM
does help, especially with linux aggressive caching...

Needless to say I'm pushing gnus quite a bit here.  All I really need
to do is write some scripts to refile all of mail.misc during 1996
into archive.1996.mail.misc, or something like that...