I started having problems within MH-E recently – folder completion was taking a very long time – between 1-2 minutes!
After posting to the MH-E mailing list, Jeffrey Honig questioned if it was a locking issue. He was right, and removing the locks resulted in a massive speedup.
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Jeffrey> I have 510 folders and it takes 2 seconds. ?My first guess
Jeffrey> would be file locking. ?Do you have any links to
Jeffrey> directories outside your home dir where you can not write
Jeffrey> .lock files. ? Is nmh configured for .lock files? Thanks
Good call!
cd ~/Mail
find . | egrep -i "\.lock"
produced
./ebay/.mh_sequences.lock
./Trust/SMTL/.mh_sequences.lock
./non-urgent/.mh_sequences.lock
./Contacts/andy.xxxxxxx/.mh_sequences.lock
./Contacts/linuxemporium/.mh_sequences.lock
I removed all of these. Now:
/usr/bin/mh/folders -noheader -norecurse -nototal +Contacts
0.08s user 0.19s system 28% cpu 0.956 total
Thanks for that. Would never have thought of it being a locking issue.
Just to demonstrate that it was these locking files:
touch ./Contacts/andy.xxxxxxx/.mh_sequences.lock
time /usr/bin/mh/folders -noheader -norecurse -nototal +Contacts
0.08s user 0.21s system 0% cpu 1:16.00 total
rm ./Contacts/andy.xxxxxxx/.mh_sequences.lock
time /usr/bin/mh/folders -noheader -norecurse -nototal +Contacts
0.07s user 0.22s system 26% cpu 1.107 total
I.e., 1 min 16 sec with the lock in place, 1.1 sec without.
Thanks Jeffrey.
Regards
Pete