[Dovecot] Multiply mailboxes vs one huge

[Timo Sirainen]

On 9.4.2012, at 17.58, Alexander Chekalin wrote:

> as I need to store a lot of messages on my IMAP server (order of 900K-1000K; this is an archive for some time, maybe a year or so), I see some "slowness" in dealing with such a huge amount. I mainly need to do searches like "get all messages from user1 at domain1.com to user2 at domain2.tld recieved between date1 and date2".

So by "received between date" you mean the IMAP INTERNALDATE as opposed to Date: header? These kind of searches are looked up from the index/cache files, and the performance should be exactly the same with all of the mailbox formats. It would be useful to figure out what exactly is causing the slowness. Is the SEARCH command slow? Something else? Is the slowness about user CPU, system CPU or disk IO?