On Friday 13 February 2009 06:57:06 pm Carlos E. R. wrote:
I've read recently very strong reasons against maildir. I understand their proponents think it is superior to mbox, and those of mbox think it is superior. Kind of vi vs emacs. Thus I choose mbox.
My feelings as "a programmer that was" favour mbox: a file per message at a size about 2K, with file counts in the thousands or millions seems to me a waste of inodes. Disk space is wasted (unfilled clusters). Search has to be slower. On some filesystems it will simply not work.
I use mix of both because KMail allows to have different types for folder and subfolders. I didn't make use of this property, it is actually mess. It happened that one day that I was tired of slow opening of opensuse@opensuse.org, at the time maildir, just as any other, that I replaced it with mbox file. It took some time to convert, but when it was done opening was much faster. As experiment succeeded some bigger folders with mbox files were transformed as well, and the rest is left as is. Also I changed default for new folders to mbox. The point of mbox being faster is that you don't run whole a bunch of routines that will open file, read a 1-2 KB, and then repeat that file after file. Modern hard disks transfer speed is something like 50 MB/s, so for the biggest mbox that has old mails from opensuse list and is 500 MB, computer needs 10s. time cat main > /dev/null real 0m10.335s user 0m0.044s sys 0m1.884s If I repeat the same command: time cat main > /dev/null real 0m1.414s user 0m0.012s sys 0m1.360s KMail always needs 35s to switch to that folder, which means that it doesn't use copy already present in memory. I haven't checked kde4-kmail. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org