From: Matt Simmons <simmonmt@acm.org>
Subject: Re: many articles
Date: 19 Sep 1998 13:49:01 -700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <yfqyarfvneq.fsf@acm.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Phil Humpherys's message of "19 Sep 1998 12:50:12 -0600"
>>>>> "Phil" == Phil Humpherys <phumpherys@utah-inter.net> writes:
Phil> I have a group with 11000 email messages in it. I'm running on a
Phil> machine with 32M of ram and 128M of memory... I invoked the
Phil> summary buffer of the group and it took an hour.... thrashing my
Phil> machine horribly.
Phil> Is it not a good idea to have so many articles in a group? It's
Phil> just killed my machine...
Only 11000 messages? Feh..
[simmonmt@auckland]:1:39pm:~/Mail> wc -l xemacs/.overview
21849 xemacs/.overview
... over NFS ... from an IPX.
Think of it as your computer's way of telling you to go do something
else for a while. =)
Of course, 32M (I assume the 32M above is the chip RAM, and the 128M
is swap) is basically a joke for running XEmacs (I assume the same is
true for GNU Emacs) under X, to say nothing of groups with tens of
thousands of messages. I have 224M, and it still kills me. Of
course, it's not swapping, but it still has a mountain of data to chew
through[1]. According to top, the footprint of my current XEmacs is 43M
(though only 27M is swapped in at the moment). You really should go
buy more RAM if you'd like to keep your sanity.
Matt
Footnotes:
[1] Look at the size of your .overview file. Mine is 6.2M, so yours
is probably around 3.1M. I don't know exactly how Gnus figures
out threads, but I'd assume it's reading the entire thing in (and
converting it to an internal data structure) at least once.
--
Matt Simmons - simmonmt@acm.org - http://www.netcom.com/~simmonmt
You know when people see a cat's litter box, they always say, "Oh, have
you got a cat?" Just once I wanted to say, "No, it's for company!"
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1998-09-19 20:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1998-09-19 18:50 Phil Humpherys
1998-09-19 20:49 ` Matt Simmons [this message]
1998-09-20 3:05 ` Phil Humpherys
1998-09-20 3:55 ` Harry Putnam
1998-09-20 20:26 ` Kai Grossjohann
1998-09-21 2:12 ` Matt Simmons
1998-09-21 3:33 ` Phil Humpherys
1998-09-21 8:01 ` Kai Grossjohann
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