From: bgamari.foss@gmail.com (Ben Gamari)
Subject: [sup-talk] Crash while scrolling
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:01:35 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1254422805-sup-9288@ben-laptop> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1254421545-sup-8303@masanjin.net>
Excerpts from William Morgan's message of Thu Oct 01 14:31:20 -0400 2009:
> Reformatted excerpts from Ben Gamari's message of 2009-10-01:
> > It seems that C would definitely be a good start (or perhaps C++ would
> > be a better idea as that is the language in which Xapian is written).
>
> I was proposing that as a strawman argument. C does not solve my
> problem.
Certainly, you will never be able to write a message indexer fast enough
to index a source instantly. That is why we have an index to begin with.
That being said, I think we can do substantially better than we are
currently doing in a lower-level language. With mutt, I can come close
to saturating my drive bandwidth while loading a folder. While
synchronizing in sup, I am lucky to get a few hundred kilobytes/second.
Certainly a large amount of that difference has to do with the amount of
processing done by each, but even adjusting for this it seems to me that
we should still be I/O bound (or at least close to it).
>
> > However, I think one of the real issues is the exclusive nature of
> > index access. In fact, this is one of my primary gripes with the sup
> > workflow. After processing a large number of messages, the write-out
> > time can be quite substantial upon killing the buffer.
>
> It is possible to address this in a variety of ways, many of which have
> been discussed over the years, but yes, I agree that a delay is
> nonideal.
Glad we agree.
>
> Making message state saving fast, or backgrounded, is a different beast
> from scanning over a mailstore.
If we are unable to update the index while the client is active,
rescanning sources would destroy usability. I would argue that
asynchronous writeout is very much a prerequisite for mutable sources.
>
> I have been working on a Sup server for quite some time that would
> address many of these problems, but progress is slow.
This was largely what I had in mind. It seems like moving index
manipulation out-of-process might be best, ultimately.
>
> > As an aside, it would be quite nice if one could run multiple
> > simultaneous instances of sup. It seems that if one only held write
> > access to the index during writes (is this the case presently?), there
> > should be nothing preventing this from being possible.
>
> It might be possible to do this with Xapian, especially if there were no
> expectation of updates being transmitted across processes.
I think initially no updates between processes would be fine.
> With Ferret,
> if it is possible, it's only with a tremendous amount of effort.
Is ferret even going to be supported after the Xapian backend
stabilizes?
Thanks for the comments and sup.
- Ben
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-10-01 19:01 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-09-11 16:58 Ben Gamari
2009-09-12 16:35 ` William Morgan
2009-09-13 15:02 ` Ben Gamari
2009-09-16 17:23 ` Ben Gamari
2009-09-26 14:31 ` William Morgan
2009-09-28 18:10 ` Ben Gamari
2009-10-01 13:43 ` William Morgan
2009-10-01 17:44 ` Ben Gamari
2009-10-01 18:31 ` William Morgan
2009-10-01 19:01 ` Ben Gamari [this message]
2009-10-11 20:31 ` William Morgan
2009-10-01 18:41 ` [sup-talk] Writing time-sensitive portions of sup in C Carl Worth
2009-09-30 21:21 ` [sup-talk] Crash while scrolling William Morgan
2009-10-04 19:59 ` Guillaume Quintard
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