[Dovecot] Performance with 200k messages in Maildir

[William Blunn]

On 18/07/2011 11:27, Vegard Svanberg wrote:
> What should I expect performance-wise if I put 200000 messages in a 
> Maildir store and use two or three MUAs (mutt and Thunderbird), on an 
> Athlon dual core 2GHz with SATA drives in software RAID (Linux)?
>
> Like; would it be useless/crawling, usable or pretty fast. I imagine 
> MUA startup / first time folder read would be slow, but daily use more 
> or less ok.
>
> Thanks to Dovecot's indexing, I imagine I would be better off 
> interfacing Mutt to Maildir via IMAP and Dovecot rather than accessing 
> Maildir/ directly? 

200,000 messages under Maildir in a single folder.

You will tend to have a relatively large number of inodes compared to 
the relative overall scale of the system.

This will tend to make backing-up a nuisance.

One thing you could consider is storing your mail under "mdbox". This 
should drastically reduce the number of inodes.

Just remember that under "mdbox" the so-called "indexes" are actually 
critical data files (i.e. they cannot be re-created like they could be 
with Maildir or mbox).

Bill