[Dovecot] Questions regarding dbox migration

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 21:28 +0200, Mikkel wrote:
>  From your comments it appears like dbox and mdbox are quite different 
> in many ways. Is mdbox going to replace dbox completely or are you 
> expecting to keep both formats?
> My point is: what's going to be the difference between dbox and mbox 
> with mdbox_rotate_size set small enough to allow only one mail per file?

The main difference is that mdbox needs to lock files when saving
messages. That's not especially nice with NFS. Single-dbox currently
locks index files, but it can be made entirely lockless eventually.
There are also some other differences like:

 - in mdbox all messages exist in storage/ directory, while in dbox
messages exist in separate mailbox directories
 - mdbox has a separate storage/dovecot.map.index that needs to be
updated
 - in mdbox message can be copied by doing a couple of small appends to
index files, while with dbox the file needs to be hard linked (and
currently even that's not done)

> How stable do you think dbox and mdbox are at the moment?

mdbox passed 16 hours of imaptest stress testing with zero errors. I'm
thinking about starting to use it at some point for my own mails. dbox
in v1.2 should also be stable, but in v2.0 last I tried imaptest could
break it, I should fix it someday soon.
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