I intalled v2.1 today. It has taken more than an hour of CPU time to
rebuild my database of about 3000 messages. Version 2.0b3 took about 13
minutes to do the same thing.
I did a test myself, and you are right. I believe the problem is the
addition of Gzip file support. Routines were created for handling
opening and creating files, and they add more operations for each file
(along with the subroutine call overhead). I did a test of 650+
messages and got the following:
v2.1: 159.30 CPU seconds
v2.0b3: 97.75 CPU seconds
There may be other culprits to the slow-down, but the Gzip file support
appears to be the culprit since it changed how files are dealt with.
Related to it is the fact that many filehandles are now symbolic (for
gzip support). This causes extra overhead in resolving the symbolic
reference when doing file operations. Hard references may speed things
up, but would break Perl 4 compatibility.
Unsure what to do it about it at this time.
--ewh
