[sylpheed:36300] Re: A performance problem (rant).

[Dennis Carr]

On Sat, 21 Mar 2015 09:39:00 +0200
John Found <johnfound at asm32.info> wrote:

> I am using Sylpheed for my e-mail handling, but have a problem with
> the performance.
> 
> On the folders with many e-mails, the performance is very poor. 
> 
> For example, in order to open a folder with 15000 e-mails, sylpheed
> needs 5..6 seconds. Even more it needs to switch between "thread" and
> "list" views.

I just got done reading through this thread, and I think I have a
suggestion: I think you're suffereing from filesystem fragmentation.

Yes, I know.  I just implied, of all things, the ridiculous notion that
your filesystem needs a defrag, when you're probably not running some
flavor of FAT. Well, hear me out.

Note, 3.4.2, hand compiled, on Debian current stable.  Running an AMD
3GHz quad core proc w/ 16 GB RAM. Recently upgraded my system by
quadrupling the RAM from 4 GB, and also doubled my /home due to my old
1 TB disk (WD Green, I think) coming to an EOL soon.  Well, that, and
it was getting pretty full. =)

I tend to keep thousands of emails in my inbox. One subdir has
everything from postfix-users - at this time, it has >12K messages in
it. Loads up right quick.  Then again, I nuke everything periodically.
I also have a cron job that goes through my ~/Mail/trash once per day
and nukes everything that's >14 days.  (Something I plan on doing
unless Yamamoto-san implements an expiry on the Trash folder, or I find
out that it already exists. =) 

BUT.

After a while, those folders take a bit to load.  Noticed this about a
decade ago.  The solution at that point was to basically 'tar
--remove-files -zcvf' the maildir, sync, and then unpack the tarball.  

Or rather, a very silly way of "defragging" that part of my ext3
filesystem.  

(Note, I've run ext3 since I started actively using Linux in '01, only
switching to ext4 for my /home with the recent upgrade - and sticking
to ext2 for /boot.)

Now, it took me a few years to get there, and I still do that once in a
great while.  

That's been my solution - move your maildir from its current location
in such a way that the files no longer exist on those sectors.  ('mv'
is not enough, that just tells the filesystem that it lives in another
spot on that part of the tree.  Somehow, those files have to not be on
the filesystem in their current state.  the 'tar' recipe above is a
quick and dirty way.  You can also use this as an excuse to get a
bigger HDD/SDD - and just schlep everything over to that new volume
in maintenance mode.)

-Dennis