Niko Pavlicek wrote:
> Hello,
> I was asking myself, why Mozilla (and Netscape since 4.x) uses one
> file for ALL messages in one folder?
> Logically it should be faster, if you had one file for EVERY message
> in a folder and just a index-file for every folder, which would be
> renewed on exit.
That's very expensive in terms of disk space, because many file systems
have a minimum file size that's much larger than the average message.
>
> With the current format mozilla does load all messages if you open a
> folder, doesn't it?
It doesn't read in the whole folder, (or, in fact, any of the folder
until you display a message) - it has a summary database for displaying
the headers.
>
> With the one-message-one-folder format it would load only a very short
> index-file and only the messages you actually read.
>
> What's wrong in my thoughts or is the current format wrong (read: a
> performance blocker)?
Our performance problems have nothing to do with the mailbox format -
Netscape 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and on have used the same mailbox format.
- David
