* Will Yardley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-09-15 21:16]:
> jz wrote:
> > In my experience it is not so slow. Deleting a message from a
> > 30000-message maildir takes 3 to 5 seconds at most on my 4 yrs old
> > celeron.
>
> It's not the processor speed, but the filesystem that's the main issue
> here. You don't mention what filesystem (or OS) you're using here.
A little primitive test if anyone cares to read it. The machine
was celeron 540 w/ 256M memory with a relatively new IDE and a
SCSI oldie running FreeBSD 4.2-RC2. Task was opening a folder
with 30300 messages, roughly a bit over 120M in mbox format.
40G IBM IDE running ffs w/ softupdates enabled
maildir: 57 sec
mbox: 27 sec
old 2G barracuda (SCSI) w/ same fs parameters
maildir: 69 sec
mbox: 17 sec
Machine was unloaded, though I think the numbers could vary for
several seconds in both directions if I repeated it several
times. Please keep in mind that this test is by no means
representative, it just gives a very rough comparison between
formats. I have no idea whatsoever what the result would be on a
decent SCSI based machine running Solaris with logging on or
Linux async mounted ext2 or whatever. YMMV.
The beauty of maildir is faster deleting, updating, writing and
higher reliability.
Maybe mutt power users or developers could shed more light on
the subject.
jz
