Re: Creating a Mhonarc archive from MS Outlook emails

[Earl Hood <earl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On March 15, 2004 at 16:49, "Lyle Schofield" wrote:

> Side question -- are there any practical limits to the number of
> messages MHonArc can convert into an archive?  I've been testing in
> batches of 350, and it only takes a few minutes on my laptop.  But, if I
> try to dump thousands of messages in there will I hit some limit of what
> can be processed?  Thanks in advance.

Scaling can be a problem if your resources are limitied.  When MHonArc
processes an archive, all the meta-information of the archive
is loaded, so archive updates for large archives will slow down
over time.  Therefore, doing real-time updates (i.e. add messages
right as they are received) of large archives should not be done to
avoid bottleneck problems.

The general solution for dealing with a large archive is to
break it down into smaller archives denoted by fixed time
periods (like each week, month, or year).  The mharc project,
<http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/> provides such capabilites, and other
users have developed their own (search the list archives).

If you are archives will grow to an indefinite size, then I highly
recommend going with the smaller sub-archive approach.

--ewh

P.S.  I have heard of users that have had up to 60,000 messages in a
single archive.  But I think you need some decent hardware and RAM
to effectively work with such a beast.