Re: [Evolution] Evo memory use

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 11:14, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 16:06, Dan Winship wrote:
> > > If the server can sort the mail for you (or thread -- that's just a
> > > special case of sorting), then it means you don't have to have headers
> > > of all the mail in the folder before you can display anything. You can
> > > dramatically reduce network load, and improve responsiveness
> >
> > Well, you still need to download all of the headers that you're going to
> > *display*. Meaning it's still O(n) on the size of your mailbox, just
> > with a different constant.
>
> Er. the number of headers you're going to display is O(n) of the size of
> the index window, not the size of the mailbox. 
>
> That's about ten messages, not the 3000-odd in the mailbox I may be
> looking at.

So, first off, unless you get 3000 new messages and delete all of them
every day, the Evolution way would result in less total network traffic
than the Pine way, which has to keep redownloading all that information
every single time you look at your mail.


Outlook versions up to and including 2002/XP behave the Pine way when
you're using Exchange, but Microsoft changed it to work the Evolution
way in the upcoming new Outlook version, because everyone hated the old
way so much. (Users hated it because it meant that if the network was
congested you couldn't even scroll your message list. Administrators
hated it because user complaints ended up forcing them to keep large
numbers of geographically-distributed Exchange servers so that Outlook
remained usably fast. Microsoft itself plans to consolidate their
current 120 Exchange servers into just 20 once the entire company is
migrated to Outlook 11.)

-- Dan