On Monday, November 20 at 10:12 AM, quoth Brendan Cully:
Yes, ~b will use the local cache, and be reasonably fast if you've got your mailbox precached (it's not a bad way to force mutt to cache your entire mailbox, actually).
Cool.
But in general, there's no particular reason to expect local searches to be faster than server-side searches - they both have to do more or less the same amount of work, and the time needed to communicate the request/response is comparatively tiny.
Well, one good reason is that I'm pretty sure the load on my local machine is really low, where I can't guarantee that on the IMAP server (which is also a DNS/Web/etc. server).
Also, since servers expect to do searches, they often maintain databases to speed them up, which makes them often much _faster_ than local searches. I've definitely found that to be the case doing =b on large Cyrus-served folders.
Cyrus does this... not all do. Cyrus is actually rather advanced among IMAP servers. As a counter-example, BincIMAP does the equivalent of running 'grep' every time. I *believe* that UW-IMAPd and Courier don't use databases, but I don't know about Dovecot. Do you know differently?
~Kyle --If Jack Valenti had been around at the time of Gutenberg he would have organized the monks to come and burn down the printing press.
-- ITAA president Harris Miller
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