Re: speed issues with large mailboxes

[emmanuel ALLAUD <eallaud yahoo fr>]

 --- Mpiktas <vaze0348@uosis.mif.vu.lt> a écrit : >
Hi,
> 
> I'm using Balsa for quite a long time now and it's a
> great mailer. Yet 
> handling of large mailboxes (2000+ letters) is a bit
> slow. For example on my 
> Debian Sid, Athlon 750Mhz, 256MB RAM machine opening
> of mailbox with 2800 
> letters takes about 20 seconds, and after first 5-10
> seconds Balsa becomes 
> unresponsive till it opens the mailbox. Is there any
> plans for improving the 
> speed? Or is there some bottleneck which will slow
> the process no matter how 
> hard you will try to improve it? If there is such a
> bottleneck, maybe it is a 
> good idea to display say first 100 letters and load
> others in background?
> 
> Mpiktas
> 

Indeed there is an issue with large mailboxes. For now
we use libmutt (which is mutt rearranged as a library)
which IIRC parses the whole mbox file when you open a
mailbox. To fix that we could only parse "partially"
the mailbox, but this means that we have to rewrite
part of the code if not all; but as you notice balsa
is still responsive during this huge loading (it is
done in another thread than the one controlling GUI),
so it is not that bad. So the actual problem is the
way we load the gtktreestore/view at once with all
mails. In short we could perhaps just try to store the
mails "on-demand", ie for instance try to parse the
messages following the sort asked by the user and
select the last ones (~100) display them, and then via
a callback we should go on storing the remaining ones
in the background. I don't know exactly the problems
this approach would involve but AFAICT this kind of
hack would certainly require a lot of changes so IMHO
this would be better done in a devel branch. Pawel ?
Bye
Manu

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