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

[Paul Sture]

On 2 Apr 2016, at 23:33, Bill Cole wrote:

>
> 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/.

Guilty as charged, though I don't have nearly as many messages as some 
folks here (and I do clear out Trash on a regular basis).

> 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.

FWIW I've been experimenting with archiving newsgroup posts (as .eml 
files) in EagleFiler and on this Mac mini things started getting slow 
and beachballing at something like 100,000 posts.  One simple answer 
there is to split them into separate EagleFiler libraries, e.g. work 
related groups / general interest groups.  Alternatively splitting it 
into folders by year might help at the OS X file system level.

Another answer of course is to get a more powerful Mac, preferably with 
SSDs ;.)