Re: Scaling Evo for large mailsets (was Re: [OT] Re: [Evolution] strategies for handling lots of mail)

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

On Sat, 2005-06-25 at 04:23 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-06-25 at 14:51 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> > > There is no exact solution that'll fit to everyone. Let me tell you what
> > > I'm doing. I have more than 2000 folders and sub/subfolders and it takes
> > > ~5 min to start Evo on a relevantly powerfull machine (PIV 3000 MHz/512
> >
> > Offtopic, i'm just curious ... How can you possibly have (and manage -
> > and have time left over to do anything other than move mails around)
> > 2000 folders of critical mail?
> >
> > On a more important note, how many total messages is that?  And how many
> > vfolders do you have?
> >
> > I've been radically redesigning the way mail information is stored and I
> > guess I need to make sure it scales well this far and beyond.
>
> Since you asked... ;)
>
> Evo+IMAP seems not to scale well when folders get more than 5000ish
> emails.  Time-to-open a folder takes an IMO inordinate amount of 
> time scanning all the headers.

the only thing that can be done for this is to populate the message-list
as the summary information comes in from the server (but this very
difficult to do since ETable's performance wrt this is horrible). we
can't make the scan any faster because of all the features users want
(like attachment icons, mailing-list vfoldering, etc) which requires a
huge amount of information from the server.

once all the summary information has been "seen" by evolution, it goes a
lot faster, but still takes a while because we have to ask for the flags
for all messages to update our summary with any flag changes that may
have been done since our last folder visit.

Jeff