5 ms·

Gnus has been great for me, but after about 40k+ (I stopped looking at the counts actually) messages in my Maildir, performance suffers for me (that is, if I st

Gnus has been great for me, but after about 40k+ (I stopped looking at the counts actually) messages in my Maildir, performance suffers for me (that is, if I start gnus from scratch it takes more than an hour and a half to open, with my entire Maildir in the page cache, and a huge amount of extremely fast memory). Notmuch doesn't seem to help at all, or if it would, it's hard to tell if it's configured correctly.

cjbprime 7y ago
That's a little odd -- I was using gnus with maildirs that size ten years ago and it wasn't so bad. nnmaildir backend for gnus, right? I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too. That seems interesting, I'll look at that. If there's one thing I have, it is a lot of memory. I would be okay if my whole Maildir was mmapped, as long as that made gnus faster.
  - egh 7y ago
    (I have used Wanderlust on emacs for about 15 years now.) I think using maildir directly may be hard to squeeze good performance out of with emacs. I'd suggest trying the alternatives: for eample, IMAP with ~30k messages should work decently in Wanderlust (and I would assume gnus), though initial load is slow (way less than hours, though). Using mu (maildir utils) via search in wanderlust to load 30k messages take about 1 minute, but if you are using mu you should be searching, not loading an entire mailbox. So there are probably some options out there, but I'd avoid loading 40k messages from a maildir directly.
csomar 7y ago
40k email? That sounds too much if it is for a single person. If you get 10 email per days for 10 years, you'd not get to 40k (35.6k). My suggestion will be to clean your mailbox instead of finding a new client.
- babuskov 7y ago
  > If you get 10 email per days for 10 years I recall times (mid 2000's) when I was active in a bunch of open-source communities and mailing lists were the main way to discuss. Getting around 50 e-mail per day was normal. I kept a lot of those discussions in my e-mail client for later reference, because the mailing list website had sub-par search function compared to Mozilla e-mail client I used at the time. It's possible he's using it as an e-mail archive for mailing lists or something like that.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Seems the number has also doubled. This Maildir starts about eight years ago IIRC, and there are now ~110k messages in it. Some of that is mailing lists for sure, I'd say I respond to about ten direct emails (not from lists) per day. If I could use SMTP for IM, I'd probably do that too.
- jlg23 7y ago
  40k/year (or 110/day) is nothing when you are active on mailing lists (yes, some of us still use them). Rule of thumb was "when you hit 1000/day, consider unsubscribing some..".

cjbprime 7y ago

That's a little odd -- I was using gnus with maildirs that size ten years ago and it wasn't so bad. nnmaildir backend for gnus, right? I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too.

microcolonel 7y ago
> I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too. That seems interesting, I'll look at that. If there's one thing I have, it is a lot of memory. I would be okay if my whole Maildir was mmapped, as long as that made gnus faster.
- egh 7y ago
  (I have used Wanderlust on emacs for about 15 years now.) I think using maildir directly may be hard to squeeze good performance out of with emacs. I'd suggest trying the alternatives: for eample, IMAP with ~30k messages should work decently in Wanderlust (and I would assume gnus), though initial load is slow (way less than hours, though). Using mu (maildir utils) via search in wanderlust to load 30k messages take about 1 minute, but if you are using mu you should be searching, not loading an entire mailbox. So there are probably some options out there, but I'd avoid loading 40k messages from a maildir directly.

csomar 7y ago

40k email? That sounds too much if it is for a single person. If you get 10 email per days for 10 years, you'd not get to 40k (35.6k). My suggestion will be to clean your mailbox instead of finding a new client.

babuskov 7y ago
> If you get 10 email per days for 10 years I recall times (mid 2000's) when I was active in a bunch of open-source communities and mailing lists were the main way to discuss. Getting around 50 e-mail per day was normal. I kept a lot of those discussions in my e-mail client for later reference, because the mailing list website had sub-par search function compared to Mozilla e-mail client I used at the time. It's possible he's using it as an e-mail archive for mailing lists or something like that.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Seems the number has also doubled. This Maildir starts about eight years ago IIRC, and there are now ~110k messages in it. Some of that is mailing lists for sure, I'd say I respond to about ten direct emails (not from lists) per day. If I could use SMTP for IM, I'd probably do that too.
jlg23 7y ago
40k/year (or 110/day) is nothing when you are active on mailing lists (yes, some of us still use them). Rule of thumb was "when you hit 1000/day, consider unsubscribing some..".