Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)
Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)
Posted Oct 5, 2009 15:26 UTC (Mon) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)Parent article: Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)
"The conclusion from this test is fairly obvious: Evolution and Claws Mail outperform both KMail and Thunderbird when faced with the task of moving large amounts of mail between IMAP accounts."That's all very well, but isn't really what I use a MUA for — especially a graphical one. If I want to move a large amount of mail around, I'll usually use rsync or scp. Maildir makes that nice and easy. And if I really had to use IMAP, I'd probably use pine.
A more interesting test would have been how long these MUAs take to check for new mail in a set of a few dozen 'active' folders. That's something that happens quite a lot more frequently, and often before a graphical MUA will even start redrawing its windows properly on startup!
I very much doubt that Evolution would perform well in that test. It used to be fairly OK, and would use the STATUS command that IMAP provides for just this purpose. But about 3½ years ago, it started doing something really stupid instead — it started fetching all the headers for every mail in the folders, just so it could tell you how many unseen messages there are. And then it got really slow. This is GNOME bug #336076.
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