[Dovecot] Overly long email of miscellaneous Dovecot migration questions

[Mark Moseley]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Mark Moseley <moseleymark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
<snip>
>> I don't know if anyone has run local indexes in larger setups, so I
>> can't really give any good answers. The worst case of rebuilding the
>> whole index isn't anyway any worse than what Courier has to do every
>> time.
>
> I'll check it out. And if we go that route and I'm still sane at the
> end, I'll be sure to report back :)

Update on this one point:

We've been running local indexes for a while now and it's worked
wonderfully. The load balancers in front of 2 groups of 30 IMAP
servers are doing a sticky-source persistence of a day. Our NFS
reads/sec dropped by literally 8x by moving to Dovecot, even with the
local indexes--looking at the graphs, it's a seriously jaw-dropping
plummet. I've not heard a single complaint of corruption. Next step is
to get the indexes on SSDs just to squeeze out a few extra jiffies.

All in all, it's been remarkably successful (and almost bizarrely
gotcha-free -- though I haven't tackled POP3 yet). Our formerly irate
IMAP users are all sweetness and light now. Thanks Timo!