From: Stewart Smith <stewart@flamingspork.com>
To: micah anderson <micah@riseup.net>, Thomas Schwinge <thomas@schwinge.name>,
	notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: notmuch's idea of concurrency / failing an invocation
In-Reply-To: <8762taxk9y.fsf@algae.riseup.net>
References: <87fwsetdin.fsf@kepler.schwinge.homeip.net>
	<8762taxk9y.fsf@algae.riseup.net>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.1.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 11:05:03 +1000
Message-ID: <87y664zfi8.fsf@flamingspork.com>
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On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:40:25 -0500, micah anderson <micah@riseup.net> wrote:
> Due to my harddisk in my laptop being slow (5400RPM), my notmuch
> database growing, and perhaps some fragmentation somewhere, this has
> become *incredibly* annoying for me. I am checking email every 30
> minutes, and I'm nicing and ionicing the processes so I can use my
> machine, but while those processes are running, I'm effectively locked
> out of a good portion of my email. 

I used to use spinning rust and also noticed things were slow. This
is in fact mostly not xapian - but rather crawling the Maildir. I
improved this early on in notmuch history by reducing the number of
seeks needed when traversing the Maildir hierarchy (e.g. stat in
i-node order, which is roughly on-disk order).

I'm about at the point where I'm going to take my git mail store
experiments and get them really to work (and everyone will have to use
'notmuch cat' or the like to access the messages) which should provide
both great storage efficiency, much faster backups of your Maildir as
well as having way fewer paths to traverse checking for new mail.

-- 
Stewart Smith