[Dovecot] Please advise on very fast search

[Alexander Chekalin]

Timo, Stan,

I've just tested mdbox and find it pretty nice for me, but now I got 
some questions for you:

1. mdbox uses 'a lot' files (m.1, m.2 ... etc), and the default size if 
2Mb. Looks like not even every message can fit into such storage 
container volume (nowadays we used to see messages of 20Mb and even 
more). Should I tune it (at least mdbox_rotate_size and 
mdbox_rotate_interval) or its size is on purpose? As for now I store 
each day's messages in separate IMAP folders (mailboxes), which gives me 
2000-6000 messages and 2-5 Gb (on disk) per folder.

2. I can use no compression, gz and bz2 - which one will be better for 
storing archive messages? I've just tested mdbox by copying 5800+ msgs 
from maildir to compressed mdbox, and it took exactly the same size (2.8 
G) in 100+ small m.* files. No good as far.

3. What if I use maildir as I do now but turn on compression, will this 
speed things up?

I'd like to use mdbox as storage but for now it is very new for me and I 
simple afraid what should I do if I'll need to manually fix the storage 
(maildir is really good for that, surely).

After all, I simple need to speed up the search and restore process in 
archive.

Yours,
   Alexander