[MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag

[Bill Cole]

On 23 Mar 2016, at 22:07, Ted Byfield wrote:

> Hi --
>
> I've been seeing a rising tide of unexpected quits and freezes (as in, 
> spinning rainbow pizzas of death). The first sign of this was 
> unexpected quits that happened when I tried to edit replies in 
> GPG-encrypted conversations, but since then the problems have become 
> much more common -- roughly 1 out of 3 times I interact with Mailmate 
> at all, including something as simple as pulling clicking on a menubar 
> counter.
>
> From time immemorial the generic advice for fixing this kind of 
> problem for any app(lication) was: reinstall it! But I use Mailmate to 
> check several accounts, so I'd really like to keep the amount of work 
> involved to a bare minimum. Is there a clear set of steps I should 
> follow to try to solve this problem?
>
> One possible clue: for a long time before these crashes/freezes 
> started happening, I was seeing keyboard lag problems -- sometimes a 
> periodic lag of a second or two while I'm typing a message.

Yes I know it was last week & Benny responded & your issue may be fixed 
by now but I have a *generic* suggestion for a practice I've found 
useful to keep MM from getting laggy:

Keep your source mailboxes clean & not too big.

Because MM is so focused on "Smart Mailboxes" and de-emphasizes the 
on-server IMAP folder structure, it is easy to get into a situation 
where you've got thousands of messages in a source mailbox (maybe INBOX, 
Trash, a singular Archive mailbox, or maybe others as well)
and as a result also have thousands of message files in a single 
directory on your local disk in the tree under ~Library/Application 
Support/MailMate/Messages/. This is not as big of a problem as it would 
have been in years past because Apple has made advances in handling 
large directories over the years and we often have humongous filesystem 
caches in memory making recently-used stuff really fast, but this isn't 
just about your Mac. MM does work in the background keeping its cache in 
synch with your IMAP server and while your Mac may have the full 
metadata for the 50,000 messages in your Trash in the filesystem cache 
because you keep trashing messages and never empty it, your IMAP server 
has dozens of people doing the same thing and it dumped your info out of 
the cache 5 minutes ago when Joe Smith needed to scan his 100k-message 
Archive folder on the same server. So remember to empty your Trash. 
Delete mail from publicly-archived lists like this one periodically. For 
old stuff you want to have archived but don't need instant access to, 
use the Export command and delete it from the server. I don't know 
exactly how badly Apple's HFS+ performance declines as files/directory 
rises these days, but it is inherently worse than linear. I try to keep 
my folders below 2k messages and that seems to help prevent excessive 
beachballing.