[Dovecot] mailbox size limit

Bazy bazy at darkdawn.net
Sat Nov 17 22:47:11 EET 2007


Bill Cole wrote:
> At 6:23 PM +0300 11/17/07, Nikolay Shopik wrote:
>> On 17.11.2007 18:11, Nikolay Shopik wrote:
>>> On 17.11.2007 17:56, Bazy wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>>> Yes, that's what I meant. Run out of inodes on that partition.
>>>>
>>> I don't think so.
>>> If /V/ is the volume size in bytes, then the default number of inodes
>>> is given by /V//2^13
>>> That's more than enough.
>>>
>> should look like this -  V/2^13
> 
> Another way to express that: if your average file size is less than 8KB,
> you will run out of inodes before you run out of disk space. This would
> present a real risk for file-per-message mailstores, since most email
> messages are significantly smaller that 8KB.
> 
> The bytes per inode value is something that can be selected when
> creating a filesystem, and different OS's and filesystems have different
> defaults. Whether a particular filesystem is headed for inode exhaustion
> really depends on how it was created and all of its contents.
> 
> 
> 

I understand... I should read mode about this.

I had dovecot with mbox and mbox is not very fast... my hard drive would
seeeeeeek before it could load a mail. I only use imap. Not to mention
when i search all my mail for something in the body of the message. I
use mozilla's thunderbird.

Yes, maybe 95% of the mail is less then 8KB, but as df -i said, I have a
lot of free inodes. :)

[root:pts/0][~]# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            19281504  140795 19140709    1% /


Thank you for all your answers!


More information about the dovecot mailing list