[Dovecot] dovecot evaluation on a 30 gb mailbox

[Stan Hoeppner]

Rajesh M put forth on 6/23/2010 12:12 AM:

> 1) is it ok that dovecot takes 5 mins every time i login if there is
> significant time difference between the two logins

No, 5 minutes is unacceptable to pretty much anyone.

> 2) as per what timo said the metadata is cached so the data pertaining to
> the extra 1000 emails were to be added to the cache .. does dovecot go
> thru all the 170000 emails again to form the meta data ? or is there some
> cache expiry period ?

It sounds like the entire mailbox is being read, and that would explain the 5
minute issue.  I had a very similar problem not long ago with large mbox files
which was solved with the mbox version of the parameter below.

Try setting:

maildir_very_dirty_syncs = yes

in dovecot.conf and see if that helps.  Please read the documentation before
doing so.  If you do this it would probably be a really good idea to use
Dovecot LDA for the mailbox delivery instead of having qmail write the mail.
Having both qmail and dovecot writing and reading the same maildir could be
problematic.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Qmail

-- 
Stan