From: Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz>
To: Darren McGuicken <mailing-notmuch@fernseed.info>,
	Matthieu Lemerre <racin@free.fr>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] How to improve the mail handling workflow?
In-Reply-To: <87hbflwkmk.fsf@bookbinder.fernseed.info>
References: <87fwv65zw1.fsf@free.fr> <87sjz6ft52.fsf@bookbinder.fernseed.info>
	<87sjz5pxkp.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz>
	<87hbflwkmk.fsf@bookbinder.fernseed.info>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5-11-g48b5e00 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 09:00:32 +0100
Message-ID: <87zktbow2n.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Precedence: list

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010, Darren McGuicken wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 07:05:58 +0100, Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> > I agree with you in that in many cases tags can be replaced by saved
> > searches. Last time I did it, i.e. used saved searches to distinguish
> > messages from different mailing lists, the result was that it took
> > very long time (something like 5 seconds) to show notmuch-hello
> 
> Interesting, what Xapian backend are you using?  I moved to chert after
> id:"87ocl1lut1.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org" and my notmuch-hello with 15
> saved searches appears in a couple of seconds when freshly loaded,
> faster when switching back to it after use.  

I use chert as well.

> That may well be slower than just tag searches but it's not yet at a
> threshold where I notice it. How many searches had you saved?

I had 45 (or so). I wanted two searches for every mailing list. One 
"tag:inbox and (...)" and the second only "...".
> 
> > Additionally, I compared the speed of command line searches for tags
> > and for the whole email addresses and even without the bug mentioned
> > above, the search for to: is usually slower than the search for tag:.
> 
> Very non-scientifically just using time and vm/drop_caches on my
> netbook, having tagged all mail sent to the list address with 'notmuch',
> I seem to get much the same performance:
> 
>    $ time notmuch search tag:notmuch > /dev/null
> 
>    real    0m21.074s
>    user    0m4.740s    
>    sys     0m1.916s
> 
>    $ time notmuch search to:notmuch > /dev/null
> 
>    real    0m20.280s
>    user    0m4.600s
>    sys     0m2.048s
> 
>    $ time notmuch search to:notmuch@notmuchmail.org > /dev/null
> 
>    real    0m21.790s
>    user    0m5.044s
>    sys     0m2.008s

My current numbers (with hot cache) are bellow.

$ time notmuch count tag:notmuch                                                                                                                                                                                             
3243
0,00s user 0,00s system 72% cpu 0,011 total
$ time notmuch count to:notmuch@notmuchmail.org                                                                                                                                                                              
2477
0,03s user 0,00s system 89% cpu 0,036 total

That is 36ms vs. 11ms. If these numbers are multiplied by 45 (or by 90
with the bug in notmuch hello), this makes the difference.

-Michal