[Alpine-info] Large Folders in Alpine

[Dimitrios Apostolou]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Edd Barrett wrote:


> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Asheesh Laroia wrote:

>

>> On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:

>> The Dovecot 1.1s are in beta; when they are released I will write a proper 

>> article somewhere about this and let alpine-info know. (-:

>

> I don't knwo what IMAP server gmail runs under the hood, but I

> definately will not be able to change th settings on it :(

>

> I have just opened my OpenBSD mailing list "label" (as they are called

> in gmail) and it took about 15 mins to open.

>

> Here is the output of top for that process:

> PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    WAIT      TIME    CPU

> 15242 edd        2    0  123M  124M sleep    poll      0:27  3.76%


CPU? OS? How many mails in the mailbox?


>

> Would you agree this is a problem?

>


Really strange! From my experience alpine is the *only* client in 
existance able to handle large IMAP mailboxes. The following numbers are 
from when using alpine on OpenBSD, connected to a dovecot 1.0 server:

Fistly, a newly opened alpine showing the alpine-info list, which has few 
mails:

22190 jimis      2    0 4776K 5960K sleep    poll      0:01  0.00% alpine

And second, here is the memory usage when I open a *huge* mailing list 
folder (~215K messages):

22190 jimis      2    0   45M   46M sleep    poll      0:04  4.59% alpine

It needs about 30 seconds to open, but I know this is because of delays in 
dovecot. I know that when alpine receives the reply from the IMAP server 
it displays it almost instantly. The only performance issue that I 
currently have with dovecot is when I enable threaded view, as I reported 
on a different mail.

So you need to find out if it is the IMAP server or alpine that is slow. I 
would suggest you to run alpine with "-d imap=4,flush" options and tail -f 
.pine-debug1 (on another note, shouldn't these be renamed to 
alpine-debug?). Also run top and see if alpine uses CPU or just sits idle, 
while loading the huge mailbox.


Dimitris

P.S. Something that shows from the top output we've pasted is that 
alpine when idle is constantly poll()ing. Shouldn't it just use select()? 
Slightly irrelevant but worth mentioning.