Blog
Sluggish Computers
Date: 28/7/2005
It's probably just me but it seems like my computers are getting slower and slower. Or my expectations are getting higher or something. But it's getting quite annoying. I know what the problem is on my main box, a 1.4ghz athlon, apart from the aging CPU clock, it only has 512mb as RAM. Which XP sp2 barely runs on. Open a few apps and it starts swaping. I've been trying very hard to convince myself to not buy some more RAM and instead put the money towards a proper hardware upgrade, like a 4200+ and supporting mobo + ram.

Anyway that sort of frustration was in the back of my mind when one Scribe user rolled back their install from v1.87 to v1.86 and mentioned how snappy the folder load times were. Which got me thinking, what happened to slow it down so much?

So I whipped out the debugger, some trace code and profiled the load times of folders. All the time was going in reading email objects off disk. So I broke that down to disk read and parse time. The disk read was trivial, so I broke the parse down to field reading and post processing. Field reads were fine... but there was a huge amount of time lost in the post processing. So digging furthur I found some crusty old code in the mail account object that delt with storing and accessing the list of mail UID's still on the server. A quick rewrite of that and it's now all clean and modern (hmmm hashtables) and lo... behold... the folder load is "Teh Snappy(TM)" again.

*the crowd roars*

(available in test11)
Comments:
fret
28/07/2005 5:14am
PS: The options window got the optimization once over in test10. It's a lot quicker displaying the font sensitive panes now. Woop!
tozz
29/07/2005 8:33am
It's nice to see you're going the coding way, and not the "buy a new computer way" :)
SnappyCrunch
30/07/2005 4:51pm
Woooo!
Paul
02/08/2005 7:22pm
On an XP SP2, P4, 2.2 GB, 512 MB system up-to-date patchwise I've seen slower and slower performance in recent months. Numerous anti-infection scanners updated and run obsessively hardly ever find anything but MRUs. Yet, any first time right-click now means wait, wait..before it opens. I'm trying a 1024 initial-and-max swap file setting, having tried other settings with no appreciable improvement.
I've concluded it's MS one-size-fits-all patches; after every monthly Patch Tuesday installation things seem to slow even more.
fret
03/08/2005 4:02am
It only seems less sluggish in some folders. So it's not as good as I'd hoped.
 
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