Re: [sup-talk] Fwd: Re: Crash while in thread-view-mode

From: Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss@gmail.com>
To: sup-talk <sup-talk@rubyforge.org>
Subject: Re: [sup-talk] Fwd: Re: Crash while in thread-view-mode
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:04:53 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1255294905-sup-8@ben-laptop> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1255292742-sup-3957@masanjin.net>

Excerpts from William Morgan's message of Sun Oct 11 16:28:48 -0400 2009:
> Reformatted excerpts from Ben Gamari's message of 2009-10-07:
> > I understand that designing software around a contingency like this
> > might not be the best practice, but the frequency with which I've
> > needed to rebuild really does make me think that ruby isn't the best
> > language for the indexer.
> 
> The indexer isn't in Ruby, it's written in C++ in the case of Xapian and
> C in the case of Ferret.

Sorry, I was referring to the mail indexer (i.e. message,
mbox/maildir parser), not the backend indexing engine (e.g. Xapian).
Should have been more specific. 

> 
> > This is easily the fifth time I've needed to rebuild and each time it
> > has taken over 30 minutes for 1.5 GB of mail. That's substantially
> > less than 1MB/second for what should be an I/O bound operation. Ouch.
> 
> I think this isn't the indexer's fault so much as the mbox parsing,
> which is Ruby.

Exactly. This is where I think C++ is probably appropriate.
> 
> I'm sorry you've had to rebuild the index so many times. The Xapian side
> of things is very new, and I think you've had a run of bad luck. But I
> am personally not motivated to improve index time performance, because
> that's not a common event. At least, it shouldn't be.

Completely understandable. I really don't have a right to complain. It
does work a large majority of the time, after all. Just figured I'd let
you know of problems as they happen. Thanks for the awesome client.

- Ben
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