[MlMt] What takes time at startup?

[Helen Holzgrafe]

Hi,

I have a partial explanation from my experience.  I have around 350000 
mail messages, mostly archived, and quite a few smart mailboxes.  For a 
while it was taking over 10 minutes to start up, which was getting 
incredibly annoying.  I used the following method to get the time down 
to a manageable 30 seconds.

I created essentially two archives. I have 50000 or so messages in the 
regular archive. These messages I actually want to search a lot and 
create smart folders from. I also created another folder inside the real 
archive folder that I call "Deep Archive". This is not a smart folder, 
but an actual iMAP folder. It contains around 300000 messages I must 
keep, but I don't expect to search or create smart folders from.

Then, I created a smart folder called "All Accounts - No Deep Archive" 
which contains all messages in all of my accounts and excludes the "Deep 
Archive" folder.  Now all my smart folders use "All Accounts - No Deep 
Archive" for the Mailboxes to search in (the first tab on "edit Mailbox" 
window).  I no longer search "All Messages" for each smart mailbox.  
Just in case it matters, which I do not know for sure, I also placed 
this smart folder at the top of my folder list so the odds are greater 
that it will be created first before all the other smart folders.  Only 
Benny can tell us if this placement at the top actually helped.

Why does this work? My educated guess:

My guess is that Mailmate somehow must be recreating the contents lists 
for each smart mailbox on the fly each time it starts up, rather than 
keeping that as part of its database all the time. Very time consuming 
at start up, but it does guarantee accuracy.

Remember that messages can come in or you can mess directly with your 
IMAP folders while MailMate is not running.  So Mailmate must do 
something at start up to make sure all those smart folders have correct 
information.  The problem for me was that it was searching 350000 
messages for every smart folder that used "All messages" as the mailbox 
it searched through.  That's a lot of messages.

I also think Mailmate was also thrashing in some fashion trying to bring 
that many messages in and out for search. So, I also suspect that how 
much RAM memory you have in your machine will also affect how much 
MailMate goes into overdrive to get this start up done.

It might be good for Benny to put up a window during this startup that 
shows how much time it is spending creating your smart folders or some 
other method of letting you you that it's actually working and not 
actually "not responding" as the operating system reports.

Benny, how close did I come to explaining this problem correctly?

-Helen

On 6 Feb 2016, at 9:12, John Cooper wrote:

> Have you tried uninstalling MailMate, including its support folders, 
> and then reinstalling it?
>
> Patrik Fältström wrote (at 8:54 on 6 Feb 2016):
>
>> On 6 Feb 2016, at 17:45, John Cooper wrote:
>>
>>> Patrik Fältström wrote (at 4:01 on 6 Feb 2016):
>>>
>>>
>>>> When starting MailMate it does something. For a very long time.
>>>>
>>>> What's up?
>>>
>>>
>>> What's it say in the Activity Viewer while this is happening? 
>>> (Window > Show Activity Viewer)
>>
>> There is nothing, no response even from the application. No menus 
>> nothing. "Application not responding" in the mach kernel although it 
>> do send events.
>>
>> Patrik
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