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From: Kyle Jones <kyle_jones@wonderworks.com>
To: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: large VM folders
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Jonathan Edwards writes:
 > Kyle Jones writes:
 > > I counted two reports.  And I have warned time and time again
 > > against using large fodlers with VM.  Maybe the rest of the world
 > > listened? :)  Not a peep about the problem on bug/info-vm.
 > 
 > I archived 3000 messages last month (a lot from this list).
 > Is that beyond VM's recommended constraints? 

These days nothing bad will happen to you except the wait time
for certain operations will be long.  Random modification time
increases rapidly with buffer size for instance, due to the way
Emacs stores buffers.  For large folders, there is a lot of
memory copying going on and this tends to thrash the operating
system's page cache.  Buffer size matters more than number of
messages.

Not so long ago, Emacs could not allocatge Lisp objects with
addresses higher than 2^23-1, which meant that a 5-8MB folder had
a good chance of crashing the editor.  XEmacs solved this a year
or three before FSF Emacs did, as I recall

