[Dovecot] mbox vs maildir

[Nicolas KOWALSKI]

Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> writes:

> On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 21:49 +0200, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
>> Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> writes:
>> 
>> > On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 20:26 +0200, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
>> >> Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> writes:
>> >> 
>> >> > The upcoming dbox and cydir formats of course beat everything in
>> >> > performance :)
>> >> 
>> >> cydir ? Does this mean there is a cyrus-like storage coming soon ?
>> >
>> > Already in v1.1 tree. It's what I'm using for my index file stress
>> > tests, because the format is practically just the index files and
>> > "<uid>." named files.
>> 
>> I just read http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-May/022772.html,
>> and the results look really impressive. 10 times faster than
>> Maildir... 
>> 
>> Time to upgrade and test ! :-)
>
> Just remember that if you lose the index files there's no easy way to
> recover the mailbox. Well, except by copying the files to maildir..

Good to know, Thanks. 

> I'm not sure if I should try to make cydir anything else than a
> benchmark format or a simple example for writing mail storage backends.
> I'm hoping that dbox will be practically as fast in all situations.

If performance of dbox is as fast as cydir, and if cydir is not easily
recoverable (a cyrus reconstruct-like tool would help a lot here),
well, cydir could stay as benchmark format. But...

As I noticed almost no difference in performance (no real numbers
here, just a usage feeling with 5-10k messages mailboxes) between
dovecot 1.0 + maildir and cyrus 2.2.13/2.3.8, having dovecot use a
storage format 10 times faster than Maildir is really attractive.

-- 
Nicolas