[imp] Improving IMP message load times

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Joseph Brennan <brennan at columbia.edu>:

> Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at horde.org> wrote:
>
>> Quite frankly, Gmail is a bad benchmark/ideal to achieve.  They have a
>> completely different design goal
>
> They have a different design. The way to really speed up is to cut out
> the IMAP client-server stuff completely. Webmail should just be a web
> interface to the mail server. I think Gmail is closer to that model.
> Messages are like password-protected web pages. The web server just
> fetches them. I am oversimplifying of course but that's the concept.

But what you just said just reiterates my point - gmail is essentially  
a local hack.  I could easily speed up IMP if I had direct access to  
the mail store (e.g. if I could directly access dovecot's cached index  
files, we would not need to do caching ourselves).

But the loss of that abstraction also destroys the whole usefulness of  
Horde/IMP - the fact that you can download it and it will work with  
whatever local mail framework you already have in place.

>> And on my system at least, IMP is much faster than native thunderbird.
>
> That surprises me.

Me too, considering I have a 6-core machine w/8 GB of memory and a  
fast disk.  But TB seems to do a lot of stuff in the background - at  
least on my machine - which makes the interface seem laggy (e.g. I can  
delete a message, for example, and it will take 5 seconds to move to  
the next message).

But TB is not a great comparison to webmail either.  It can serve as a  
disconnected client, and it can do a bunch of prefetch stuff that we  
can't in a browser environment.

Wish we could do more browser-side stuff but the unfortunate state of  
affairs is that browsers are not yet to the point where they can  
replace desktop apps for very data-intensive applications.  And the  
typical use pattern of e-mail diminishes to usefulness of caching  
browser-side anyway; since e-mail can be accessed from a variety of  
platforms, odds are good that you are going to spend an excessive  
amount of time synchronizing the endpoints when synchronizing at the  
server level simply makes more sense.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]