From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: patroclo7@gmail.com (Giorgio Lando)
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:04:26 +0100
Subject: [sup-talk] header cache
In-Reply-To: <1200516410-sup-1963@south>
References: <704d6aa20801150454j635ed24p63fd544579c6e148@mail.gmail.com>
	<1200453820-sup-4777@south>
	<1200514969-sup-7541@clarabella.clarabella>
	<1200516410-sup-1963@south>
Message-ID: <1200519319-sup-915@clarabella.clarabella>

> If you look at the log messages, there's one at the emitted at the
> beginning of loading the headers, and one at the end, so you can see
> exactly how much time adding a cache will save you (minus however long
> it takes to load things in from disk).
> 
> I'm curious what this number is for 40000 headers. It seems to be about
> 10 seconds for my 5000-message IMAP folder, so I can imagine it being
> quite significant.

I guess you are referring to mutt: in this case I can confirm that the
cache (mutt is compiled with gdbm) saves about 80 secs.

What I meant is that it is nonetheless very slow, and that this is why
one SHOULD NOT ordinarily access an IMAP folder with 40000 headers. In fact I
do not do this in mutt, where on the contrary I enter INBOX and change folder only when
needed (so only seldom I change to All Mail). I can not do exactly the same 
with sup: either I pull mails only from the INBOX, but then everything already 
archived in gmail through the web interface will
not be seen by sup, or I go with All Mail, but then I have to load each
time 40000 headers, which is extra slow (and would be very slow also with an header cache).
Finally, there would not be any point to pull mails from all the other folders/labels, 
because they would include only duplicates of mails in All Mail and they
would not enrich sup index at all.

I have also the feeling that sup's philosophy is not very consistent
with IMAP's philosophy, which is to access the same structure of folders
from different interfaces, syncing immediately any operation on the server, 
so that folders and labels are exactly the same from any interface.
Sup follows its own philosophy: thus, it does not deal with folders at all, 
and (as you admit often) does not aim to play well with other ways to check emails.
Gmail's imap is not an exception to this conflict between sup's
philosophy and imap's philosophy, because gmail's labels are, when you
access gmail through IMAP, nothing else than folders!

So I have finally decided to go back to POP3, download all mails (including
mails sent from the web interface, in the case of gmail) locally and let sup
index and open them locally. The mails are anyway kept on the server, so
I can also access them through a traditional IMAP client with folders
(such as mutt) or through the web interface when I am around the world
without my laptop.
In this way, I can use sup in a fast way without any bad interplay with
other ways of checking emails. This is very important for me because I
travel a lot and it
is not possible for me to access emails exclusively from my own
computers with sup installed :) .

Thus I do not think that I will go back to access gmail through IMAP
with sup. Anyway I hope to be able to do some testing of the IMAP headers cache 
with other small IMAP servers I have access to.

Giorgio