On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 15:44 +0100, Robert Treharne Jones wrote:
> What may be an issue is that the PST file size in Outlook is currently about
> 2GB, and because I use Word as my email editor the EXE files for Outlook and
> Word take up more than 100MB of memory as running processes out of a total
> of 512MB.
I can't see a problem with having 100MBytes of executable image files,
in that much RAM.
The likely candidate is file size.
It would be tempting to make a blank file of say 3 GBytes size, and then
directly copy the PST file onto that, thus leaving 1 GByte of empty
space immediately beyond it, and then do whatever the current version of
WIndows requires to prevent it from writing to sectors in that spare
GByte, except for mail ... that would take care of the file
fragmentation problem.
DOes WIndows/Outlook read the whole of the PST file into RAM In order to
work on it? I suspect without any evidence that it does.
THus you require 2 GBytes of RAM for that, another 2 GBytes for the
Operating System, since last time I looked, WIndows split RAM on a basis
of one for you, one for me (I think if you have more than 4 GBytes you
can alter that.) and say 512 for what you currently use. Oh, and double
the ize of all the index files as well, since they'll get read in.
A generic discussion of email storage formats
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the oldest format I know is mbox, basically a text file, where mail is
distinguished by the headers (From: To: etc). These can get very big,
and therefore the strategies of having an mbox per folder of mail, or
moving to Maildir evolved.
Maildir is most often used with IMAP I thnk, and stroes each email as a
separate text file, in a tree of directories, recognisable by repetitive
elements of Current New and so on .
Maildir is therefore most efficient if your file system - the one it is
storred on which may be a server of course - efficiently stores small
files. ReiserFS does so. Ext2FS is perhaps better suited to mbox.
NTFS - well, I think it is a good filesystem, but I don't know how good
it is at a myriad of small files.
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Thunderbird is pretty good, actually it is phenomenally good.
WHether it uses Maildir on WIndows I am uncertain, and would like to be
enlightned.
I do wonder what advantages accrue to using Outlook in teh absence of an
Exchange Server. Pehrpas you have one of those to work to.
--
Midgley. If the client wants second best, sell him second best.
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