Re: balsa, and other graphics mailer are slow

[Carlos Morgado <chbm chbm nu>]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 09:51:03PM +0100, Lorenzo Delana wrote:
> 
> Anyone have never tried to read a /var/spool/mail/<user>
> with about 10000 messages ?
> about 5 minutes with mozilla mail and balsa...
> about 10 secs with "mutt".
> 
true

> The problem, is that BALSA retain in memory all readed messages,
> but the memory isn't an optional... I propose to modify the code
> of balsa introducing the indexing of message and read on demand.
> 
> 
atm balsa always threads messages and that bites speed wise. eventually you
will be able to select threaded/flat/etc

balsa uses mutt code to read and parse mailboxes. mutt uses ncurses, balsa
uses X. mutt will always be some degrees faster than balsa or any other X 
based mailer, live with it.
mutt keeps the same internal representation of the mailbox as balsa, but
mutt display a 24 line list in text mode while balsa constructs a 10000
entry ctree to display the message list. afaik you cannot create gtk lists
or ctrees in real time. 

one idea i have been toying with was build the ctree from down to up and
start displaying as soon as the bottom page is done. i'm not sure if this 
is possible or the impact it would have on redraw/refresh events. this would
not speed up balsa, but would lower the latency the user experiences. this
is particularly true for imap mailboxes. comments ?


-- 
Carlos Morgado - chbm(at)chbm(dot)nu - http://chbm.nu/ -- gpgkey: 0x1FC57F0A 
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