[Dovecot] Re: dovecot Digest, Vol 26, Issue 5

[Todd Burroughs]

On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> dovecot-request at dovecot.org wrote:
>> Am Samstag, 4. Juni 2005 01:31 schrieb Han-Wen Nienhuys:
>>
>>>> I'm seeing terrible performance. Sometimes, my client needs several>
>>
>> (...)
>>
>>>> How can I debug this problem? I'm running dovecot .99.14 on a Mac Mini
>>> (OS X 10.3,  512 mb, 80 gb).
>>
>
>> mbox or maildir?
>
> Maildir.
>
> Listing or opening the directory via the OS is rather slow, btw,

This is one of the problems that I've heard about with maildir.  If you
have a lot of messages in a folder, it may be slow.  If listing (i.e.,
"ls -l") is slow, then maildir will likely be slow as well.  maildir
relies on the filesystem, so if it isn't good at dealing with a lot
of files in a directory, maildir won't work well.

I'm using dovecot over NFS with mbox and it is usually very fast due
to dovecots caching.  This should work the same, regardless of mbox
or maildir.  mbox is generally slow with large (in size) mailboxes and
NFS usually isn't as fast as local disk.

Have you tried a newer version?  I use the latest from CVS and it seems
pretty good.  So far, I've seen no corruption that dovecot hasn't dealt
with on its own.  There's probably about 100 accounts using it and I'm
almost ready to expand the test bed considerably.  I'm sure the "stable"
branch works fine and is easier to compile than the CVS one ;-)  This
way, you will be using the newer code base and any problems will be more
likely to get fixed.

Todd