From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sun May 19 2002 - 16:44:58 MDT
On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 01:22:12PM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> I'm trying to increase my reading/time use effectiveness
> and have noticed processing certain Email folders in pine
> on my 450 MHz Pentium II machine is taking a bit long.
> (How long has it been that we have had databases that
> we are *still* processing email as flat files???).
>
> That happens when the folders start to get into the 10-15 MB
> range so I'm having to separate things out by quarters
> (as the lucifer archives do). Q1 2002 Extropian list
> feed exceeds 10 MB in size. I'm not sure but I think
> a novel is around 1 MB in size (Damien would know).
Pine uses a rather poor memory allocation scheme for processing
mail -- far as I can tell without reading the source code, it slurps
the whole mailbox into memory.
You really want to look into Mutt. Mutt is a newer console-based
mail tool for UNIXen, and among other things it has a Pine keystroke
emulation mode, so you don't have to relearn everything. However,
Mutt has numerous advantages, including macros, article threads in
mailboxes, complex mailing list digest handling features, PGP/GPG
integration, and most importantly a *sane* memory allocation scheme that
uses memory-mapped files to get at the mailbox and only malloc's memory
to store the essential header information.
Go look at www.mutt.org and see if it suits you. (It's what I'm using
right now.)
-- Charlie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:12 MST