GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 105409
If for large mailboxes view->flat index is selected Balsa eats up processor space for more than 3 minutes
Last modified: 2009-08-15 18:40:50 UTC
I have mailbox with more than 5000 letters. If I select view->flat index Balsa does something for more than 3 minutes. (This is how long I waited). During that time it uses 100% of processor and it is impossible to close it clicking on the window close button, yet it can be minimized and maximized, although after such operation Balsa does not redraw anything. The only way to close Balsa then is to use killall balsa. I have AMD Athlon 750 with 256 RAM if that helps. Balsa Debian package version is 2.0.6-1
Was the mailbox opened when you choose flat index?
Yes, it was. I can always reproduce it. No problem with mailbox with 180 letters, when choosing flat index. Maybe if I wait a bit longer everything will be sorted out?
Yes it should, but I consider it as a bug if you have to wait longer to have a non-threaded version of a mailbox view than to load it and thread it! I think we have something in CVS that will dramatically (Yes I take the risk to say that) improve the perf in that particular case. It will show up in next release 2.0.7.
Cool, I will look forward to that release. And Balsa finished, it took 17 minutes to convert to flat index. I needed that because I want to mark all unread letters to read, because when I imported this mailbox from Mozilla Mail all the letters were read. Though toggling to read also takes a lot of time. Now I chose the threading and it's already 3 minutes Balsa is working:)
This unread thing seems weird to me. We'll try to understand what is going on here, because I think that we should not loose mail flags between Mozilla and Balsa (the file format is pretty clear).
FWIW: with current cvs code, on a 400MHz/256MB AMD box, I can open a maildir mailbox with ~1,000 messages with 15 seconds of user cpu time (35 seconds on the wall clock, but that's over a slow X connection!) with JWZ threading. It's a little slower for a flat view; presumably gtk renders all the rows at once, and that more than offsets the time saved by not threading. I don't know how mbox vs maildir affects timing. It should now be linear, so for your setup (twice the cpu speed, 5x the size), I'd expect under a minute. That's for initial loading; rethreading should also be a whole lot better, and in particular no slower than initial loading!
This is mostly fixed in balsa-2.0.10.