Lots of open() calls with nnmaildir

[Martin Geisler]

Hi,

I've switched to the nnmaildir backend for my mail because I like the
idea that I can use external programs to fetch my mail and sort it in
maildirs without me having to wait for it in Emacs.

This works nicely, except for one thing: Gnus takes a fairly long time
to start up when my maildirs are big.  Big means around 11,000 mails
in the largest three maildirs, the other nine maildirs are all much
smaller.

I ran Emacs using strace, and then I saw, that Gnus is opening every
mail in all maildirs when it starts --- not the mail isself, but the
files in the 'nov' directories.  This takes a little while for 11,000
files, even though I use ReiserFS and a 2.4 GHz Pentium IV.

My question is: would it not be more efficient to put all that
information into a single file?

>From what I know about how to read files to get a good I/O
performance, then it's better to read in say 4K blocks from a big file
than lots of reads of just ~250 bytes from lots of different files.

If not, could I then somehow tell Gnus not to read this information
for groups that I don't use regularly, such as sent mail?

I like the idea of having those mails in maildirs too (instead of a
nnfolder, say) but I just don't want Gnus wasting time on them on
every startup.

Thanks for any insights!

-- 
Martin Geisler                                  My GnuPG Key: 0xF7F6B57B

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