Re: [fetchmail-devel] save_str problems.

[Rainer W. <rwe...@ms...>]

Sunil Shetye <sh...@bo...> writes:
> Quoting from Sunil Shetye's mail on Fri, Apr 30, 2010:
>> Matthias, you have said that the regular uidl code is faster than the
>> fastuidl code for 10000 uids. Do you mean 10000 uids in the .fetchids
>> file or 10000 uids (i.e. 10000 mails) on the server?
>
> [ This should be read as ]
>
> Matthias, you have said that the regular uidl code is faster than the
> fastuidl code for 10000 uids. Do you mean while processing 10000 uids
> on the fetchmail side or while getting 10000 uids from the server?
>
> The fastuidl code downloads less UIDs from the server and hence has to
> compare less UIDs to check for new mail. If there are very few new
> mails, then the fastuidl code is expected to save a lot on the string
> comparisons.

It is conceivable that the string comparisons take less wallclock
time than repeatedly asking a server for an UID and waiting for the
replies does. IMHO, this is still a bad tradeoff because 'e-mail
download' is a background batch job and even on a single-user
workstation, minizing e-mail download time at the expense of directing
more resources away from the interactive jobs the user interacts with
doesn't really make sense except if one is using a uplink whose cost
is proportional to the time spent 'online'.