Re: [Pan-users] Big XML files... (was Re: Re: Better processing of very large groups?)

[Rui Maciel]

On 10/18/2011 09:00 AM, Duncan wrote:
> OK, I'm rereading this thread based on the current sqlite solution
> discussion, and...
>
> What do you think of the new, akonadified (and thus sqlite, mysql, or the
> experimental postgresql backends) kmail?

Personally, I think it's horrible.  After using kmail since the days of 
Kubuntu 5.04, this akonadi cruft forced me to switch to Thunderbird, and 
never look back.  In fact, the only time I ever looked back was to 
wonder if it would be that hard to fork kmail into a stand-alone email 
client, but it appeared to be too much trouble for such a small reward.

Now, after installing Kubuntu 11.10, this akonadi/nepomuk crap is 
becoming so inconveinent that I'm currently considering dumping Kubuntu 
entirely and adopt some other distribution/DE package.   I simply don't 
know why KDE people insist in pushing that stuff, but at least they are 
succeeding in driving people away from their DE, which is a shame.


<snip/>
> What I'd like to know tho and what's of interest for this list, is how
> claws-mail, with its mh-format (precursor to maildir, single plain-text-
> message per file) mail storage, maintains the speed and slim memory
> footprint it does.  Pan and claws-mail actually have similar data store
> sizes here, but there's no comparison in especially cold-system-cache
> startup speed.

I don't have a clue on how claws-mail was designed, but the maildir 
format has the notorious advantage of storing each individual message in 
a separate file.  As a HD is still system memory, although slower, this 
could be interpreted as already having every message already in memory, 
only requiring an negligible amount of memory and processing to handle 
that data, including displaying the message.  As each individual email 
tends to be extremely small (less than 1kB?) then the time it takes to 
parse each individual email is clearly negligible.

<snip/>


Rui Maciel