On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 00:56 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: > On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 17:05 -0500, Dave Richards wrote: > > I added this comment to the bugzilla report. I'm not a developer, but > > I do have to *deploy* Evolution to hundreds of people. > > > > > > --------------------(snip)------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > I have been watching this thread on evolution-hackers. Please > > remember when considering design of these things, that some of us are > > running multi-user systems with hundreds of users on at a time. There > > might be cases where memory is better than disks in such cases. I > > have hundreds of users and can easily get all of this into 16GB. What > > will be the result of all of those people now using the disk? > > Why wont it slowdown your evolution instances? Simple: > > Your users typically don't need every single message header that can be > viewed using the summary view at every millisecond of the day. They > typically need 50 of them per second, perhaps 100 or 200 for insanely > extreme cases. > > Their fingers can't scroll fast enough for a disk (that is largely > cached) to be to slow. Also note that the index which must be iterated > on that disk will be a continuous block of data. Such data can be read > almost instantly (how long does it take to read a few megabytes from a > modern disk? --> that would be the entire index, you only need lets say > 100kb of that data per ten seconds IF the user is really fast). > > If the users start to scroll lots of times through their summary view, > the Linux kernel will probably put some of these indexes in memory > buffers. > > Imagine spastic users that do nothing but scroll all day long at > extremely rapid speeds .. multiply that with 10.000 such users, and you > still wouldn't have any problems at all.
Even for single-user, disk-summary-branch was slower than the current in-memory implementation. Now scale this to many hundred users all accessing the same disk and you will notice a much larger impact on performance because there will be a lot more disk seeks compared to just single-user. -- Jeffrey Stedfast Evolution Hacker - Novell, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] - www.novell.com _______________________________________________ Evolution-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
