[Dovecot] Max IMAP fodlers

Jeffrey Nikoletich jeffrey at nikoletich.com
Tue Dec 8 01:11:07 EET 2009


I have been working with user to have them cut down on their folder list.

the fs is ext3 and even when moving the user to own server, etc I get the slowdowns and email hangs. Thought it was a connection issue so I brought the users machine in to the DC with the same issues. It is just "weird"

Jeff N.

On Dec 7, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> 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. :)
> 



More information about the dovecot mailing list