Email Retrogression
Further to that note about dealing with a few thousand queued emails: The more time I spend watching these fancy modern programs like Thunderbird, Outlook and Mail.app slowly sputter their way through a small set of messages, the more I realise how incredibly good Netscape 3.0: Mail was, way back when.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be out smashing some looms.
May 4th, 2007 at 8:47 am
It’s amazing, isn’t it? I don’t really understand how most of these apps can achieve something like an O(n^3) runtime on a linear list of messages…
On a vaguely related note, I saw the horror of Thunderbird (1.x release from a few months back) on a 1Ghz Duron machine with 768Mb of RAM. A machine like that really highlights how slow the GUI code in Mozilla based apps is.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:26 am
It’s because all of the coders have been indoctrinated into the database cult. If you’re using flat files rather than a bloated behemoth of a table structure, then you’re just not a proper programmer.
(This is how you can tell I’m not a proper programmer. Using a database to represent a list in the order of tens of thousands of items sounds like rank insanity to me, but there you go.)
As for Mozilla’s GUI code, ask James about that if you want a laugh. Joost had to buy him a quad-core machine (rather than the puny dual-core one he had) just so he could finish compiling the Mozilla codebase before he hit retirement age.