[Dovecot] 1.0-test21

[Moe Wibble]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 09:44:13PM -0400, Tom Allison wrote:
> 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!
> ;)

Agreed. And that sieve stuff is pretty disgusting configwise, too.

> 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.

Agreed again. Robustness was obviously not a design goal.

> 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...

I felt more comfortable w/ my cyrus setup _before_ you told me that. *gulp*