[MlMt] What takes time at startup?

[Philip Paeps]

On 2016-02-06 23:40:41 (+0100), Benny Kjær Nielsen 
<mailinglist at freron.com> wrote:
> On 6 Feb 2016, at 22:03, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>> I have 1.4M messages, and while startup takes a while it doesn't take 
>> nearly as long as Patrik reports.
>
> I've had reports about this number of messages before, but I'm still 
> surprised it works at all with such a number of messages.

Data point: I have about 1.5 million messages and MailMate takes 
approximately 5 minutes (wall clock time) to start up.  (Which is 
approximately one cup of coffee, so I'm not complaining!)

I do have comparatively few smart folders (30-ish).  Sieve sorts my 
messages (generally by mailing list) into appropriate mailboxes 
(approximately 200) server-side.  I use smart folders mostly to group 
mailing lists I actively follow.  Most of them are of the "message is in 
mailbox X" variety.

> Everything in MailMate is based on these queries and with more than a 
> million messages then this can be slow on startup. It can also take up 
> a considerable amount of memory.

Most of my larger mailboxes have a few tens of thousands of messages in 
them.  Very few have over 100,000 messages.  No mailboxes has over 
200,000 messages (remarkably).

> (I cannot really promise to make more improvements soon, but there 
> might be some simple things you can change to speed up the launch.)

Once MailMate has started up and is in the steady state, it seems to be 
using about 3Gbytes of memory (which isn't bad, considering 20Gbytes of 
data in 1.5 million messages).  It also feels responsive.  Even searches 
in larger mailboxes are quite snappy.

Aside: is there a way to flip the "hold down ⌥ to search in the 
current mailbox" to "hold down ⌥ to search in all mailboxes"?

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information