[Dovecot] 1.0-test21

[Tom Allison]

Farkas Levente wrote:
> Timo Sirainen wrote:
> 
>> I recently saw some benchmarks (measuring system load) comparing 
>> Dovecot mbox, maildir and Cyrus. Dovecot was much slower than I 
>> thought, Cyrus was many times faster in most tests. Dovecot with mbox 
>> was also much faster than with maildir, even though my 0.99.10 mbox 
>> code is pretty bad.
> 
> 
> IMHO the performace issue and mainly the system load peeks are very 
> important!
> what's more if cyrus faster than dovecotm, than it's hard to argue for 
> dovecot (since cyrus is more feature rich).
> 

That last statement is arguable.  cyrus-imap has some nice capabilities. 
  But if you use procmail then it's no contest who is going to win!
;)

But I seem to remember that their indexes had an achilles heal.  If you 
(re)moved an email file via filesystem then the indexes were badly 
corrupted and there was little you could do with that mail directory 
again.  I don't think that this is proper behaviour for imap servers 
under a unix environment.

That said, I suspect that cyrus used their indexes as a means of 
providing some rudimentary search results for a give key and an array of 
file inodes for the correlating email messages in maildir.  This would 
store the locations in the file inode table, making for a nice speedy 
access of files.  Hence, the removal of a file would corrupt their inode 
lookup table...