Re: [Pan-users] performance ...

[wim . delvaux]

On Tuesday 09 December 2008 07:17:23 Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 12/08/2008 address@hidden wrote:
> > it seems to me that PAN could use some performance tuning.  I cannot
> > believe
> > that it take so long to sort some 1000000 articles.  It are just
> > strings ?
>
> I take it that you either don't program, or have never studied sorting.
>   I don't program any more, but back when I did, I was very interested,
> for some strange reason, in sorting.  One thing I still remember is
> this: as the number of items to sort goes up, the time goes up, and it's
> never in a 1:1 ratio, although the best get gosh-darn close: triple the
> number of items and the time goes up by a factor of about 3.39.  And,
> even if Pan does a pointer sort, eventually it's going to have to move
> all those strings into the right order, and that's going to take a
> little time, especially if they're on disk instead of RAM.  I'm not
> saying that Pan couldn't be faster, but when you're talking about a
> million articles, it's going to take more than an eyeblink.

if you have a collection that is loaded and request a different sort (e.g. by 
date) it is fast !

It is just when you switch it is slow.  So i think that the reading of the 
articles takes long (perhaps the reading/scanning of the data takes too 
long ?) or is it the putting in the GUI ? (all articles are loaded and not 
those that are shown/visible ? )

Anyway I have developed software for 25 years now and know that IF something 
is slow, there are ways to make things faster *except* if you use an 
algorithm or tool that has bottlenecks for the task at hand.

Finally AFAIK pan1 did not have the problem.

W