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Re: mutt - slow mbox'es



On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 02:24:55AM EDT, Thomas Glanzmann wrote:

> > Well, if you feel like hacking up Mutt support for the mbx format,
> > you can have the only mailbox format that performs even better than
> > the mbox format.  Your other option is to use the IMAP header cache
> > with a connection to your local UW-IMAPd (which already supports mbx)
> > running on mbx mail stores (which is my setup, minus the header cache -
> > I don't need header caching, since I rarely leave my 300 megabyte inbox).
> 
> why noone did that already?

probably because the current craze is maildir ;-)

> Are there some numbers available?

It's a full-binary-indexed file.  That gives it better theoretical read
performance (in userland, mind you) than the reiserfs gives your kernel
using its balanced tree algorithm.  I don't have any benchmarks handy,
but something that can outperform the fastest open source filesystem
on Earth without the overhead of constant system calls (if you have
enough RAM to store most/all of the index) sounds like a winner to me.
(On my own server, it's interesting to note that the difference between
mbox and mbx backends isn't all that great, since my bottleneck is CPU
power, not disk bandwidth.  Even so, my expunge seems at least 2-3 times
faster, and general read performance is at least twice as fast.)

> How many
> lines have other dbx implementations?

I assume you're looking for mbx implementations?  Here's some stats from
the c-client library (the one used by UW-IMAPd), comparing the mbox code
to the mbx code:

$ wc unix.c
 2425 12513 84923 unix.c
$ wc mbx.c
 1721  8165 59027 mbx.c

> How many man hours would it take
> to implement it?

Based on the above statistic, I'd be optimistic on the man-hour
prediction :-)

 - Dave

-- 
Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?
It's simple, Skyler.  You've seen what food processors do to food, right?

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