On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, at 2:51pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> The University of Washington IMAP server is slower than death on >> qualudes (for very large mailboxes) > > Yeah, Derek and I investigated this at MCLX. What Derek discovered > (correct me if I'm wrong) was that UW IMAP, when deleting messages from a > folder does so according to the following, very bad, process:
It is actually worse than that. A Berkeley/mbox format mail store is basically a flat text file. Messages are appended one after another. There is no index. To read message number #368, you have to read and parse messages 1 through 367, too. And you have to do that every time you open the mail store. This gets really ugly if you have a large number of messages, or very large messages (think file attachments). To compound the problem, many IMAP clients disconnect and reconnect very frequently. When it comes to deletes, the process of moving the mailbox to /tmp is stupid, but the rest of it is unavoidable. If you delete a message from a an mbox mail store, you have to rewrite the whole file, just like you do for any other text file. Basically, mbox sucks. :-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
