Recent message crossposted from TB mailing list

[Steve Lamb]

    I CC'd a post I sent out to The Bat!'s mailing list.  The main reason is
because I finally got my Archive account moved over from PMM to TB.  TB uses a
database format message base and that message contained numbers for the exact
same messages in both PMM's single file per message format and TB's database
format.

    I know we, the list, have discussed the differences between the two but we
never really had a direct comparison of a *LARGE* database of messages for
cold, hard numbers.

    Here they are again:

>     Hmmm, my mail archives are 74.9Mb under PMMail and 39.2Mb under TB.  36Mb
> wasted space under PMMail, 1.4Mb wasted under TB.  Of course, that is the
> tradeoff for going to a database instead of a single message format.  :)

    Now, there are two ways to look at it.  Optimist and pessimist.  On the
one hand, yes, I save ~36Mb in the database format over the single file per
message format.  On the other hand, that is over a database of 13806 messages
which mostly consist of my sent mail archives from 12/97!  The down side is
that the database format loses some flexibility and robustness.  With the PMM
database I can combined two databases, reindex, and go.  I don't think that is
possible with TB's database.  This is important to me since I am moving my
mail to and from work and sometimes take the wrong archive.

    Anyway, I personally feel that it is really a moot point now that we have
some decent numbers.  36Mb off of a 994Mb drive (554Mb free) isn't a big deal
to me.  It's taken me over a year and a half to generate that much information
so I don't feel that it would be a large problem even in the long run.
Everyone else, however, is more than welcome to interpret the data as they see
fit.

    Finally, I must note that the drive in question is a FAT32 drive,
partitioned to use 4096 byte clusters.  On a FAT16 system, it would be a
problem.  On HPFS, NTFS, EXT2 there would be little, if any, difference
between the two.

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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