[Dovecot] Max IMAP fodlers

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 11:24 -0800, Jeffrey Nikoletich wrote:
> Also is there is hard limit on the amount of folders dovecot can handle? I have a user who has over 3000 folder (including subfolders) that is having issues with delays in loading, moving, and deleting messages.

Are you sure those problems are even caused by the number of folders?
There are only two issues I can think of:

1) Client LISTs all folders, which can take a while to download. Clients
don't usually do this very often.

2) Filesystem is being slow. If you're using filesystem with directory
indexes (and most are nowadays indexed) I don't think 2) should be much
of a problem. And I think even without indexes OS would have cached the
directory entries in a way that accessing the same directory would
always be fast.

So have you looked at other potential problems, like if deleting
messages is slow and deletion is done by move-to-Trash, does the Trash
have tens of thousands of messages?

And at least ext3 already limits the number of folders that can be
created with Maildir++ to 31998. That's probably good enough as a folder
quota. :)

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