[pmmail-list] time to clear trash - performance

[David Forrester]

On Sat, 06 Oct 2001 11:08:12 -0400 (EDT), Bruce Francis wrote:

>On Sat, 06 Oct 2001 10:57:12 -0300 (ADT), PMMail OS/2 Support wrote:
>
>>NOTE 2: The system was more or less unusable while this was going on.
>
>Yup, and you have about 4x, maybe more (P2-133) or so more CPU 
>than I do.  This function/problem is the only one that has made me
>consider more CPU power....   :(
>
>==> I've really tried to find ways around doing this, as it completely
>ties up my computer, sometimes for *hours*.  However, sometimes I
>forget and it's like poking myself in the eye.... only it hurts longer.
>

I've seen this problem for a while, but I was blaming it on FAT32.  I
have had my mail on a shared FAT32 partition on my laptop (400MHz
Celeron with 320MB RAM) so that I can get at it from either OS/2 or
Win2000.  My practice for mailing lists is that at the end of the
month, I delete everything from the previous month (so I'll have up to
60 days worth of the lists).  And have delete on shutdown set to 60
days.  As people have commented, under OS/2 shutdown was taking a long
time and almost hanging the system.  But, under Win2000, it was
reasonable.  So, I turned off the "delete at shutdown", and tried to
remember to turn it on under Win2000 every now and then.

I've since moved the mail onto a small HPFS partition and installed the
Win2000 support that someone recently put on hobbes.  So far it's
working OK and closing PMMail is lot better under OS/2.

Just did some tests under OS2 (Warp4, FP15, PMMail on HPFS drive):

-  with over 2500 items in trash, and delete on shutdown set to 60 days
closing PMMail took over 5 minutes.  The system would respond, but it
wasn't really usable.

- When I reopened there was 2099 items left in trash.  When I closed it
again, it was to fast to worry about.

- So I reopened and changed delete on shutdown set to 59 days.  This
time closing PMMail took close to two minutes and there where 1994
items in the trash when I reopened it.

With those results, and never having any performance problems when
deleting files, I assume the problem is in rebuilding the index file. 
I'll have to try it under Win2000 when I'm next there.


--
David Forrester
davidfor@terrigal.net.au
http://www.os2world.com/djfos2/

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