On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 07:05:58 +0100, Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> I agree with you in that in many cases tags can be replaced by saved
> searches. Last time I did it, i.e. used saved searches to distinguish
> messages from different mailing lists, the result was that it took
> very long time (something like 5 seconds) to show notmuch-hello

Interesting, what Xapian backend are you using?  I moved to chert after
id:"87ocl1lut1.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org" and my notmuch-hello with 15
saved searches appears in a couple of seconds when freshly loaded,
faster when switching back to it after use.  That may well be slower
than just tag searches but it's not yet at a threshold where I notice
it.  How many searches had you saved?

> Additionally, I compared the speed of command line searches for tags
> and for the whole email addresses and even without the bug mentioned
> above, the search for to: is usually slower than the search for tag:.

Very non-scientifically just using time and vm/drop_caches on my
netbook, having tagged all mail sent to the list address with 'notmuch',
I seem to get much the same performance:

   $ time notmuch search tag:notmuch > /dev/null

   real    0m21.074s
   user    0m4.740s    
   sys     0m1.916s

   $ time notmuch search to:notmuch > /dev/null

   real    0m20.280s
   user    0m4.600s
   sys     0m2.048s

   $ time notmuch search to:notmuch@notmuchmail.org > /dev/null

   real    0m21.790s
   user    0m5.044s
   sys     0m2.008s