[Dovecot] Expected size of index-files?

[Luuk]

Timo Sirainen schreef:
> On Feb 8, 2008, at 6:25 PM, Jan van den Berg wrote:
>
>> That's actually quite a lot.
>> Consider you run 100k+ mailboxes (1GB each) and you would move to
>> Dovecot this will be a huge chunk out of your storage.
>> Is using dovecot index files really that much faster than running
>> ":INDEX=MEMORY" ? Where could I find some benchmarks about this?
>
> IMAP benchmarks are difficult to produce because they depend so much 
> on what clients are used (and how many clients user is using, and how 
> user is using the clients). For webmail type setups indexes help a 
> lot. For Outlook/Thunderbird they help a lot less.
>
>> so, on average maybe 20%-30%  of the size of your messages ?
>
> It's actually more to do with the number of messages than the size of 
> the messages. dovecot.index.cache file is the largest one and it 
> completely depends on what IMAP client is used. It contains only the 
> information clients are interested in.

i could not stop myself from verifying.. ;-)
i moved my original indexes to 'old'
started thunderbird and had dovecor recreate the indexes, and moved them 
to 'old2'
stopped  thunderbird.
started outlook-express and had dovecor recreate the indexes, and moved 
them to 'old3'
stop outlook express

the 'du -s *', now looks like this:
31M     cur
4.0K    new
7.2M    old
3.7M    old2
2.2M    old3
4.0K    tmp

and there is a big difference between the 'thunderbird-indexes' and the 
'outlookexpress-indexes'
and an even bigger if you look at my 'old'-indexes....

-- 
Luuk