[kdepim-users] Seperate 'sets' of mail boxes

[Peter777]

On Thursday 20 November 2008 08:36:24 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 November 2008, Peter777 wrote:
> > No doubt a lot depends on the size of the mbox, not so much how many
> > emails. Consider the 14Mb Pegasus mbox file, it has only 1680 email
> > messages in it, whereas one has 4336 emails in it, and only 11Mb.
>
> Of course, it depends on both factors, but I'd say the number of
> messages has much more influence. Since KMail keeps an index of the
> mbox file (which grows proportionally to the number of messages) the
> number of messages has a greater impact than the size of the messages.
> Also it's the number of messages and thus the number of items in the
> message list that influences the speed of the message list.

Okay, thanks for explaining that.

> > That is not how Pegasus does it, it is very quick.
>
> And it is not how KMail does it. It is also very quick. Status changes
> are only written to the index file. Deleting a message also just
> changes its status leaving the deleted message in the mbox file. To
> prevent the mbox file from growing too large, KMail compacts the mbox
> files from time to time in the background. This compaction is claimed
> to have a noticeable impact on very slow computers.

I'm trying to get Ubuntu moved to another computer, much more grunt, (2 gb 
ram, 3.0 Ghz cpu, SATA drives, etc), but ideally I'd like to get all of the 
Pegasus mail emails over to KMail first on this slow computer, then I can 
drop pegasus and WINE on the slow one, before moving everything across.

> Pretty much the same as what KMail does. Pegasus surely also does some
> sort of compaction to prevent unlimited grows of its mailbox files.

It's left up to the user, you do it manually on a folder.

> 256 MB really is the lower limit for KDE 3. And your choice of
> applications really needs lots of memory since Firefox, Gnome
> applications (gedit, nautilus) and KDE applications all pull in a lot
> of mostly disjoint libraries.

Yes, I don't know how a P2-350 and 256Mb ram is doing all this (running 
Ubuntu). I may drop GNOME altogether on the other one, as I use KMyMoney, 
prefer Konqueror to Nautilus and KPDF does a whole lot more than GNOME's pdf 
app.

> > It seems from what you are saying that mbox under KMail is very slow
> > indeed.
>
> I respectfully disagree. From my own experience (I've used an Athlon 550
> with 384 MB RAM until mid of last year) I cannot say it was ever really
> slow. Compiling KDE was unbearably slow on this machine, but KMail
> wasn't slow at all.

Hmm, that sounds good. So KMail/mbox is not slow, and _may_ even be as 'fast' 
as maildir ?

> > Won't having (possibly) hundreds of thousands of files with maildir
> > (one file per email message) put a significant (extra) load on Linux
> > systems ? There is abviously , in Linux , the equivalent of a FAT, so
> > keeping track of so many files (or a lot less with mbox) must place
> > some overhead on system peformance.
>
> Not really. The file systems used by Linux are optimized for file
> servers (since, contrary to Windows, Linux traditionally is a server
> system) and thus they are blazingly fast compared to FAT.

I prefer Linux and am in the process of dropping Windooze completely, but it 
will take time. I only thought that, by using maildir format, with all the 
(potentially) zillions of files, that it would be a big overhead to disk 
access and performance in general.  But it seems not.

So, at this stage, we are saying that mbox and maildir are 'equally as fast' 
as each other ??

Regards,

Peter
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