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Re: Some ideas to improve performance

2004-11-24 16:31:59
On Wed, Nov 24, 2004 at 02:13:29PM -0800, Gary Funck wrote:


I just did a little timing experiment. On an SGI Octane (roughly
equivalent to a 500Mhz Pentium, I'd guess), a simple formail -s
ran at a rate 484 messages per second. Adding the overhead of forking
procmail (formail -s procmail -m /dev/null < in_file > /dev/null)
dropped the message throughput to 80 messages per second. From this
we can conclude that there would be a noticeable improvment in
performance if procmail was able to do its own mbox splitting.

I think you're assuming a lot.  For instance, you're assuming that
we will be utilizing this capability often enough to make it pay
off against all the thousands of other times that we are just using
procmail straight-up, no splitting needed.  Procmail has to be read
into memory, and it's niche and tiny and tidy right now.

To me, this is kind of like saying driving around in your 4WD
all the time is more efficient, because if there is a snowstorm
you won't be stuck.  What about the gas mileage the other 99.999%
of the time?

-- 
dman

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