Re: [opensuse] Handling larg email Inbox files

Thanks for all the replies.

Not wanting to enter the Mbox vs. Maildir debate -

But I thought I'd follow up with how I ended up solving this problem,
using a really clever utility called "ArchMbox", available at
SourceForge.

It's dead simple to install and use. With a simple command line
statement I was able to archive all mail older than a given date
interval, making the problem file small enough to handle in evolution.

thanks again,

Regis

On Sat, 2009-02-14 at 14:21 +0100, Sandy Drobic wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:

Also I changed default for new folders to mbox.

The point of mbox being faster is that you don't run whole a bunch of routines
that will open file, read a 1-2 KB, and then repeat that file after file.
Modern hard disks transfer speed is something like 50 MB/s, so for the
biggest mbox that has old mails from opensuse list and is 500 MB, computer
needs 10s.

time cat main > /dev/null

real 0m10.335s
user 0m0.044s
sys 0m1.884s

If I repeat the same command:
time cat main > /dev/null

real 0m1.414s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m1.360s

KMail always needs 35s to switch to that folder, which means that it doesn't
use copy already present in memory. I haven't checked kde4-kmail.

Whoah, that's pretty miserable! Thunderbird uses indices that speed up
switching folders a lot. Though I am using imap, so I can't compare it to
local storage.

On my setup I have about 5.8 GB in my personal mailbox (via imap on server).
In my case it is a Cyrus imap, that I plan to switch to dovecot in the future.

Changing folders takes at most a few seconds, even if the folder contains more
than 40000 mails.

Though I can understand that for a personal mailbox on local storage mbox is
indeed a better solution than maildir. The I/O to access the mailboxes is much
less than for maildir.


--
Sandy

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