> I have found that mutt 1.1.9 is about 4x slower reading a 7.4 MB mail
> file with 1451 messages in it than mutt 1.0.
>
> I tried this several times to eliminate the effects of caching. It took mutt
> 1.0 about 7.8 seconds to bring up the file, it took mutt 1.1.9 about 28.8
> seconds to bring up the same file.
>
> I don't know if you would consider this a show stopper but it was enough for
> me to back out 1.1.9 and go back to 1.0.
In addition to the NFS issues mentioned.
I had an exchange about mutt 1.1.x slowness with tlr two weeks ago.
I noticed the same slowdown after version 1.1.2. The slowdown occured
even for small (a few dozen kB), local mailboxes. The explanation:
I fixed charmap support, i.e. finally installed the charmaps-0.0 stuff
into /usr/local/share/mutt/charmaps (/usr/local is mounted across the
network).
The slowdown rate is proportional to the number of different
Content-Type/charset= headers in a mailbox file, apparently
because the charmaps are loaded along with the messages.
If you leave the same instance of mutt open and (c)hange mailboxes, the
charsets should be cached.
<rant>
Convenient as they are, charsets are another feature that make it easier
for ppl to shoot themselves (and others) in the foot. Now that my mutt
is charset sensitive, I often find messages with big5, iso-2022-jp, or
koi8-r, although none of the special characters are actually in the
message body (checked with vi in "C"). Free performance killer with
every mail message.
</rant>
