Re: [Evolution-hackers] ... and how camel should be

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 17:05 -0500, Dave Richards wrote:
> I added this comment to the bugzilla report.  I'm not a developer, but
> I do have to *deploy* Evolution to hundreds of people.
> 
> 
> --------------------(snip)-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I have been watching this thread on evolution-hackers.  Please
> remember when considering design of these things, that some of us are
> running multi-user systems with hundreds of users on at a time.  There
> might be cases where memory is better than disks in such cases.  I
> have hundreds of users and can easily get all of this into 16GB.  What
> will be the result of all of those people now using the disk?

Why wont it slowdown your evolution instances? Simple:

Your users typically don't need every single message header that can be
viewed using the summary view at every millisecond of the day. They
typically need 50 of them per second, perhaps 100 or 200 for insanely
extreme cases.

Their fingers can't scroll fast enough for a disk (that is largely
cached) to be to slow. Also note that the index which must be iterated
on that disk will be a continuous block of data. Such data can be read
almost instantly (how long does it take to read a few megabytes from a
modern disk? --> that would be the entire index, you only need lets say
100kb of that data per ten seconds IF the user is really fast).

If the users start to scroll lots of times through their summary view,
the Linux kernel will probably put some of these indexes in memory
buffers.

Imagine spastic users that do nothing but scroll all day long at
extremely rapid speeds .. multiply that with 10.000 such users, and you
still wouldn't have any problems at all.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
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