> -----Original Message----- > From: Cameron Childress [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 12:31 AM > To: cf-community > Subject: Re: Outlook PST's, all versions > > > On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 11:46 PM, Jim Davis > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Honestly this seems pretty much par for the course - I'm not aware of > any > > email program that specifically handles huge message caches really > well (the > > online ones are fastest - lots more horse-power on the server and > they tend > > to manage things in smaller doses). > > GMail does. But I guess that's the whole point of putting it there. > I'm certain desktop software could be made to manage larger volumes > better too. I don't think Gel's suggestion of MySQL is all that far > off actually. There are a number of free OSS databases that scale > well beyond 2G and are redistributable.
Well - yeah, but then again so does Exchange using WebMail. Server-based mail is generally better at handling large volumes simply because the client never actually handles large volumes (you normally see what, 50 messages at a time?) I'd bet that the problem isn't in the database (Outlook actually uses the very capable SQL Server engine I believe), it's the interface. When Outlook opens a folder it's actually doing a significant amount of work just to display the information. There are rules of visibility, application indicators, custom rules, associations, threading, etc. If you've got 10,000 messages in the folder then it does all of this for 10,000 messages. Then open a folder with 100 messages and it responds pretty much instantaneously - from the same data store. It's not the database that's the problem. This is completely different than how an online email system works. Online systems are (of course!) much more like traditional web applications: quick queries for partial datasets. gMail has an offline mode now (leveraging Gears) - see how it handles 10 or 20-thousand messages. ;^) I actually don't think it's capable of doing it (I believe that Gears limits the amount of client-side storage) but I'm curious. (This is all just "for example". For me Outlook is definitely sluggish on folders with more than 10,000 messages - but nowhere near unusable. Displaying messages is pretty quick, but actions over all messages - something like a "select all, mark unread" might process for 30 seconds but you don't do that all that often either. Then again I'm sure other people must have 10's of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of messages.) > But that would require innovation. Something Microsoft won't be > interested in for Outlook till they actually start losing market > share. I still consider Outlook absolutely best of breed, personally (especially after being forced to use Notes for the past three years). Nothing that approaches its functionality even comes close. I was disappointed that Outlook 2007 didn't receive the same attention that the rest of Office did for 2007 but it was a major (and innovative) upgrade nonetheless. There's definitely work to be done here - but the fact of the matter is that this problem (massive amounts of mail) is definitely a "1 percenter" - a problem that affects less than 1 percent of the users (in this case much, much less I would assume). Multi-threading of display tasks, streaming data from the disk, etc - that all can be used to help here, but the vast majority of users simply don't have the problem. These kind of issues just aren't prioritized. That said Outlook's definitely not the right solution for everybody and there definitely will be other solutions that beat it for specific features. If gMail's doing everything you need then you'd have only been using a thin (very thin) slice of what Outlook offers in any case. Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:294819 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
