Re: GNUMail release

[lukekendall]

On 21 Jan, Ludovic Marcotte wrote:
>  On 2003-01-21 05:47:46 -0500 address@hidden wrote:
>  
> > Also, I noticed after installing  Pantomime-1.1.0pre1 that the TODO
> > list doesn't mention what I feel is the only serious problem with
> > Pantomime: it uses far too much memory, because if you open a large
> > mailbox it appears not to load the message bodies on demand, but as
> > soon as you open the mailbox.
>  
>  Nope, it does load them on demand.

Okay, sounds good - I'll carry on getting this version to build.

> > This knocked it out of contention as a MUA for me, simply because it
> > couldn't handle big mailboxes (50MB and up).  It also makes it slow to
> > open big ones.
>  
>  Currently, Pantomime caches all mail headers when using a local
>  mailbox (it's not the case for an IMAP mailbox).

Ah, even the headers we're not displaying.  I see.

>   This makes
>  initial parsing of a mailbox quite time consuming and also it
>  slows things down when you open a cached mailbox since the
>  object graph (of the cache) is _huge_.

Mail.app built an index file (probably the seek positions of each
message in the file).

It rebuilt the index file when it opened the mailbox file, if the
mbox modification time ever exceeded the index file's.

There was a special command you could use from the command line, to
append a message to an mbox, which also updated the index file with
that extra bit of info.  These could then be used with procmail et al.

It all worked very well.

>  I have a patch here that caches only the headers we need. It
>  dramatically reduces cache sizes, mailboxes parsing time and
>  the time taken to open mailboxes that have a valid cache.

Sounds like Mail.app!  :-)

> > Because of the build problem, I didn't get a chance to see whether any
> > work had been done on that issue.
>  
>  I did a good amount of work on optimizing this but I decided to
>  not include it in 1.1.0pre1. It will be included in 1.1.0pre2.

I look forward to that version even more!  :-)

luke