[Pan-users] Re: Can creating task list be optimized?

[Duncan]

"Duncan" <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:21:01
+0000:

>> Duncan,
>> 
>> Does this bug look like the same issue you are having when downloading a
>> large number of smaller attachments?
>> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353317
> 
> It was certainly part of it.  However, the performance patches added to
> 0.110 should eliminate the biggest problem.  I haven't actually tested yet
> as I just finished first-round processing the 24K of single-part messages
> I downloaded the other day, last nite.  It was that 24K messages download
> that triggered the thread.

Upon thinking about it, I'm not likely hit by that bug as much as most,
due to the way I use pan.  The bug as reported is that pan stops
downloading while it is saving.  I don't actually download and save in one
shot, preferring to download to a large cache (currently set for 11 gig
for my binary instance, on a dedicated partition, pan's default is 10
meg), then go offline to sort thru and either save or delete.  Thus, all
pan does here during the download phase is write the downloaded articles
directly to cache, which will be far less disruptive in a single-threaded
application such as pan then attempting a CPU intensive decode, and a
second write to disk possibly to an entirely different part of the disk
(therefore inducing local i/o latencies as the drive seeks between the
save location and cache).

I'd seen mentions of the bug a few times and always considered myself
lucky not to have that particular issue to any measurable degree.  Now I
know why.

As it was in 0.109, however, just writing to the cache was bad enough. 
0.110 seems much more reasonable in that (tho I've not yet tested it in
small binaries, the thing that prompted this thread, tho initially that
was just creating the task list thus the title, but it was as bad
downloading and emptying the task list). I'd hate to see how bad it might
have gotten actually decoding and saving at the same time!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman