Re: /usr/contrib/bin

[Jason R. M. <jas...@ma...>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Gro=DFjohann) writes:

> Not sure if the previous message sent via GMX got through.

Yes, but apparently my reply didn't -- I'll include it again below.

kai...@gm... writes:
=20=20
> You said that you'd like Tramp to be faster for fetching mail from a
> remote Maildir.  Can you point to a specific part of the operation
> that should be faster?  For example, is it the connection setup that
> takes so much time or is it the actual file transfer?
=20=20
Definitely the actual file transfer.  The connection setup isn't bad
as it's only slow when you start up Gnus.
=20=20
> If it's the file transfer, then I wonder if it might make sense to
> compress the remote file before running it through base64 encoding.
=20=20
I don't even think that will help.  As it is, I'm turning on=20
compression at the ssh level.

It seems that the individual file nature of Maildir is the problem.
If I have say 50 messages in the remote Maildir, when I hit `g', each
file is downloaded and unlinked one by one before being incorporated
by Gnus.  Compare this to downloading a single mbox file containing 50
messages which is orders of magnitude faster.

Perhaps if instead of going back and forth to get each individual
message from the Maildir, the entire Maildir was downloaded or
synchronized at once, and then resynchronized to remove the downloaded
files from the remote Maildir.  In rsync terminology, something like:

localhost$ rsync mailhost:~/Maildir/ /tmp/Maildir/

localhost$ rsync /tmp/Maildir/ mailhost:~/Maildir/

(Gnus then incorporates from /tmp/Maildir/)