[Dovecot] dovecot evaluation on a 30 gb mailbox

[Stan Hoeppner]

Timo Sirainen put forth on 6/19/2010 9:43 PM:
> On 20.6.2010, at 3.33, Rajesh M wrote:
> 
>> 3) next i changed squirrelmail display preference to list 500 mails per page
>> and then clicked on inbox ... expecting dovecot to take atleast around 1-2
>> mins to show the mails
>>
>> ... the mails were displayed in just 8 seconds .. awesome performance
> 
> Fetching metadata for 500 messages took 8 seconds? Still sounds slow. Although maybe it's because of maildir. I'm anyway not happy until Dovecot can open a mailbox with millions of messages and access them in nearly constant time (few milliseconds, with SSD).

Roundcube 0.3.1 seems to have a hard coded limit of 200 mails per page.  On a
dual CPU 500 MHz Celeron with 384MB and a single 500GB SATA drive, running
both RC and Dovecot 1.2.11 on the box, it takes about 5 seconds to pull
metadata for each set of 200 messages on a 13k+ message mailbox.  This is
using mbox.

I agree with Timo, 8 seconds for 500 messages on that hardware seems a bit
slow given what my lowly setup can do.  Was the box under load when you tested
or idle?  What disk subsystem is the maildir stored on?  Single disk or high
performance RAID?  Was the disk subsystem under load or idle when you tested?

-- 
Stan