Re: huge mailboxes

[Pawel Salek <pawsa TheoChem kth se>]

On 2001-07-22 15:05 Yachar Tajahmady wrote:
> I'm using balsa and I'm another fan of mailing lists ;-)
> But I'm wondering what you call "huge files".
> I'm currently having mboxes with more than 500 messages in it, and it
> takes
> no more than 1 second to open (the first time you load it).
> For info, I'm using a Pentium III 800 with 512 Mb RAM.

For the record, I have my trash mailbox with 2248 messages in it, total
size 47MB, and it takes 5s to open it with balsa over NFS (old 10Mbs
network). The box is PentiumII 450MHz. File transfer of this size over
this network would take a minute.

The mailbox is in MH format (maildir format would do as well).
traditional mbox format that keeps all the messages in single file is
good only for small mailboxes. This mailbox format can be used by many
mail programs, not only balsa.

Frankly, I am going to collect all the pros and cons for using different
mailbox formats. Somebody posted here maildir description URL
http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

Has anybody got more information about mailbox formats analized from the
performance angle? Or such a collection already exists?

/Pawel
-- 
Pawel Salek (pawsa@theochem.kth.se) http://www.theochem.kth.se/~pawsa/
Theoretical Chemistry Division, KTH voice: +46 8 790-8202