Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!occrsh!uokmax!munnari.oz.au!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: messages - a confession Message-ID: Date: 10 Jul 90 21:18:27 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 24 Yes, even I have the same problem from time to time. My own observation is that the performance of Messages is very critically sensitive to a number of factors: system memory, paging, and file system & network performance. When all is going well, Messages runs quite quickly, but when any of these factors becomes a problem, performance deteriorates quickly and dramatically. The bottom line, I guess, is that Messages uses a lot of resources and the performance degradation when any of them is scarce is not what you'd call graceful. What I don't know is an easy way to determine what the problem is in any specific circumstance. Basically, it's just trial and error. (For example, you could try getting rid of your FLAMES file temporarily to see if that's the problem, though I doubt that it is unless it is very inefficiently written. Similarly, you could temporarily move your .MESSAGES tree onto the local disk to see if your file system is the problem.) The specific behavior you describe sounds most likely to be file-system-related to me. 2 to 4 second delays when you click to read a new message are just unreasonable. They don't happen to me here. If they happen to you regularly, I'd suspect the file system. Does it take that long to "cat" an arbitrary file in the messages database? If so, the file system is definitely the problem. If not, the next question would be how much swapping is going on... -- Nathaniel