On March, 30 1998 at 16:48, J C Lawrence wrote:
DBM is not used. It just happens that extension on the .mhonarc.db
file cooresponds with the default extension used by Berkeley DB
files. The file is just Perl code.
<sound of KB tapping>
Ahh! A heavy excercise of perl's associative arrays. That will get
expensive as the DB gets large, no? I forsee a page thrashing fest...
Depends. MHonArc requires access to all keys when doing threading
and sorting, so process memory would not be saved that much if
Berkeley DB or similiar on-disk hash was used. Remember, actual message
data is not stored in the db. Just some header and resource information.
Note, the trick to keep archives manageable is to break them up
by a time period, like by month. After a year has passed, create
a single year once since it will no longer have to be updated
frequently, and long discussion threads will be kept across months
(here is where MULTIPG comes in handy).
I believe some people have fairly large archives. If you have
a decent system, the .mhonarc.db should not hurt that bad (but will
slowup startup time).
--ewh
