🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Wells writes:
 > In article <9210021722.AA05654@wendy-fate.UU.NET> kyle@uunet.uu.net (Kyle Jones) writes:
 > 
 >    Joe Wells writes:
 >     > It would be really incredibly nice if it were possible to give
 >     > vm-confirm-quit a value that would mean VM would ask before quitting a
 >     > folder if the folder were larger than a certain size in bytes.  I propose
 >     > that a numeric value for vm-confirm-quit should have this meaning.
 > 
 >    Good idea.  I think size should be in number of messages rather
 >    than bytes, though.
 > 
 > What is the relative effect of number of messages vs. number of bytes on
 > how long it takes VM to load a folder?

A large number of bytes primarily means trouble if you have a
slow disk or are loading over NFS.  If you;re tight on physical
memory you'll page some as VM scans the buffer sequentially
looking for message separators.  But Emacs will have just loaded
the whole file into memory so very little of it should have been
paged out, so paging should be low.  Things may get bad later in
the session because of gap motion, but VM mostly avoids this at
startup.

A large number of messages means VM must spend time building
the message lists, parsing headers and generating the summary.
Number of messages is much more significant here, because each
message, regardless of size, adds about the same amount of work.