In LA

I’ve been using Apple’s mail application for a while, and I like it, but it has been getting slower and slower over time. It turns out that the culprit, according to comments on the Hawk Wings blog, is that the “envelope” sqlite database that Mail.app uses can become larger than necessary, full of empty space left behind when objects have been dropped, and a simple command executed in the terminal reorganizes the data structures. The process (which involves the sqlite command “vacuum”) is analogous to defragmenting a disk.

Following the directions on that web site, I quit the Mail application. I then opened Terminal and ran the following optional command so that I could see the size of Mail’s Envelope database before and after the cleanup:

% ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index -rw-r--r-- 1 zach zach 42M Mar 6 00:55 /Users/zach/Library/Mail/Envelope Index I then ran the actual cleanup command: % sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum index; That took about a minute. I then again checked the size of the Envelope Index: % ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index -rw-r--r-- 1 zach zach 25M Mar 6 01:07 /Users/zach/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Hot damn! The database dropped in size from 42Mb down to 25Mb. I ran Mail, and it popped up near instantaneously. Wouldn’t you know, it is now lightning fast to open folders full of thousands of messages. Before I “vacuumed” the Envelope index, such a folder might have taken upwards of 10 seconds to open.

If you’re running OS X Tiger and have been using Apple’s Mail application, do yourself a favor and try running the commands to “vacuum” Mail’s Envelope Index. If Mail.app has been slow, you may be shocked by the increase in speed. At the very least, you’ll recover a bit of disk space.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Apple, Geeky, Tiger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.