[PATCH] fsync applet

[Rob Landley]

On Wednesday 17 June 2009 20:29:07 Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Thursday 18 June 2009 00:52, Cathey, Jim wrote:
> > Though systems are a lot faster now the loads put upon them
> > are also a lot heavier.  Much like
> > the constancy of human behavior, the delays in systems tend to
> > hover at about what we will tolerate.  Twenty years ago's ten-second
> > delay is still today's ten-second delay.  Unless it's twenty.
> > Or five.  Never 0.01, which is what it would be based on clock
> > rates.
>
> My guess is that performance bugs are only fixed when they are
> painful enough.
>
> Example. KMail's abysmal performance on big mail folders
> is not fixed yet only because it is tolerable on 2 GHz+ machines.

Ha.

> Five years ago, it would be a must to fix it. today, KMail devels
> can procrastinate.

Kmail devs can glue kmail to an unrelated suite of crap which pops up rss feed 
notifications which can only be disabled by tracking down and deleting unwanted 
commands out of the /usr/bin directory so it _can't_ run the notification.  
Kmail has been decomposing for years.

As for performance, my email mbox goes back to 2004, and has 19k messages in 
it.  The linux-kernel mbox file keeps dying (corrupting its index) when it 
passes 100k messages and I have to split it.

No, my beef with kmail is that the editor goes into weird states inserting 
text into the middle of messages, to where it's adding about one character 
every two seconds and I can type two lines ahead and then go get a drink and 
come back before it's caught up.

The _new_ kmail version (the one xubuntu 9.04 gave me, anyway) takes about 30 
seconds to pop up the busybox mbox file in "threaded" view.  That's only got 
20k messages in it.  (And don't get me started on how unpleasant and non-
obvious they made it to actually _select_ threaded view in the new version.)

I've been looking to replace kmail for a couple years now, it's just the 
alternatives suck worse.

Kmail is a bad example, unless you were _looking_ for a pathological case...

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds