Re: Gnus slow incorporating vast quantities of mail

[David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU> writes:
>> More configuration details: using nnml (into an AFS directory) fed
>> by a (Kerberized) POP server, sorting using a moderately complex
>> nnmail-split-fancy rule set.  Most of the time it works reasonably;
>> 'ls -lSr ~/Mail' says that the new three largest Incoming... files
>> I have are 2.5, 1.4, and 1.2 MB, respectively, and I haven't
>> noticed sorting those being too painful.
> 
>> Any hints as to what might cause this?
> 
> Did a lot of that mail sort into the same directory?  I don't trust
> AFS file creation speed, and I particularly don't trust AFS with
> large directories.

I think there were over a thousand messages to debian-user, for
example.  I don't think they were particularly clustered, though.
Hmm.  (1409 distinct messages in mail.lists.debian.user currently.)

> Note also that AFS performance can vary a *lot* depending on network
> conditions, file server load, and a lot of other things that are
> hard to measure or control.

<nods>

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
...and if you think slurping in 8.5MB of mail is slow, try 'ls -F /afs'.