[MlMt] What takes time at startup?

[Steven M. Bellovin]

I have 1.4M messages, and while startup takes a while it doesn't take 
nearly as long as Patrik reports.

On 6 Feb 2016, at 15:49, Patrik Fältström wrote:

> 350k email messages is nothing.
>
> I have just below 2 million. 12k added each month, approximately.
>
> There is something happening at startup that takes very long time. And 
> I am interesting in knowing what happens.
>
> Patrik
>
> On 6 Feb 2016, at 19:43, Helen Holzgrafe wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Also, if you have Apple's "Activity Monitor" (inside the 
>> Applications/Utility folder) running when you start up Mailmate, you 
>> can directly see that Mailmate is using 100% of your computer's 
>> available  CPU cycles during its startup.
>>
>> That's why a Mailmate Startup window that shows some form of progress 
>> bar, the name of each folder as it is being processed, or "25 of 300 
>> Smart Folders verified" or some other indicator gives the user faith 
>> that MailMate is actually doing something and not hanging. This 
>> window also gives some clue as to how long until MailMate is done 
>> with start up.
>>
>> -Helen
>>
>> On 6 Feb 2016, at 10:04, Helen Holzgrafe wrote:
>>
>>> 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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