[Dovecot] New mailbox format

[Todd Vierling]

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, nodata wrote:

> Apologies for being rude, but I've not heard complaints about maildir
> being slow. Is it? It would be nice to see benchmarks.
>
> It seems like some kind of cache manager would solve the problem, if there
> was one, but then some might say we'd be doing the job of the kernel.
> Are there kernel parameters which can be tweaked to address the slowness?

It mostly has to do with the filesystem being used.  The System V based
extended filesystems (which most people know as "ext2" and "ext3") have the
same history as the BSD filesystem ("ufs" or "ffs"), and neither is
particularly efficient at handling a directory of more than 10k files or so.
And it's not usually the lookup of a single file that's a problem; it's
listing the directory (when doing index synchronization) that will be slow.

Other options now exist that improve this quite a bit.  On Linux, there's
reiserfs; on BSD, there's lfs, and some enhancements to ffs as part of the
"FFSv2" project.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> <tv at pobox.com> <todd at vierling.name>