Re: [Evolution] .IBEX file? UPDATE

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

Ibex files aren't the same type of index that the summary file is. The
summary file has a chunk of data per message that contains info like
subject, to, from, etc. The ibex files are more of a lookup table that
indexes all the words found and which message(s) they were found in.

What I suspect is happening is that when messages are deleted, the code
does not force a re-ibexification of the messages because it'd be
extremely slow to do on large mailboxes. Simply put, this is an
optimization.

If you are tight on space or you don't search much, then you can always
turn the indexing off. This will make it so that .ibex files will not be
created but, at the same time, searches will be slower if searching on
body content.

Jeff

On 16 Jun 2001 13:46:26 -0400, Michael Leone wrote:
> On 16 Jun 2001 11:53:50 -0400, Michael Leone wrote:
>
> > Why would the index be close to twice as large as the file it's
> > indexing? I deleted/expunged many mails from this folder, and the mbox
> > size went from 3.3M down to the 2.59M you see above. Yet the .ibex file
> > size stayed the same, at 4M. Wouldn't it have also gone down, since
> > there was now over 100 emails less to index?
>
> Ok. So after deleting even more email (I'm now down to a mbox size of
> 2M, from it's original size of 3.3M), I closed Evo, and deleted the
> .ibex file.
>
> This .ibex file was 4.4M in size; it never changed size, to reflect the
> now smaller size of the mbox.
>
> So, then I restarted Evo, and - as expected - it recreated the .ibex
> file.
>
> [turgon minas-aran LRP]$ ls -la
> total 2782
> drwxr-xr-x    2 turgon   turgon        146 Jun 16 13:33 ./
> drwxr-xr-x   41 turgon   turgon       1035 Jun 10 13:26 ../
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 turgon   turgon         63 Jan 19 23:23
> folder-metadata.xml*
> -rw-------    1 turgon   turgon    2001376 Jun 16 13:30 mbox
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 turgon   turgon     124308 Jun 16 13:33 mbox.ev-summary*
> -rw-------    1 turgon   turgon     711936 Jun 16 13:33 mbox.ibex
>
> Note that the size is now only 17% of it's previous size (711,936 v
> 4,006,400). And, as a side effect, that I've gained 3M disk space. :-)
>
> A suggestion: perhaps a button, or menu item, to "Rebuild index". Looks
> like (for now), the .ibex isn't being updated to reflect downward sizing
> of mbox files (altho I will admit that this is the only folder I've
> tried this experiment on, as of this moment). Manually rebuilding the
> index would help to clear out the cruft (a word I've only heard used in
> conjunction with Linux, BTW :-).
>
> Perhaps it wouldn't hurt, every now and again, to close Evo, and rm all
> the .ibex files, so they could periodically be rebuilt. I'd hate to put
> a command like that in a cron script, since Evo might be open and
> running when the .ibex files got removed; and I presume that could cause
> havoc.
>
>
>
>
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