On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, nodata wrote:
Apologies for being rude, but I've not heard complaints about maildir being slow. Is it? It would be nice to see benchmarks.
It seems like some kind of cache manager would solve the problem, if there was one, but then some might say we'd be doing the job of the kernel. Are there kernel parameters which can be tweaked to address the slowness?
It mostly has to do with the filesystem being used. The System V based extended filesystems (which most people know as "ext2" and "ext3") have the same history as the BSD filesystem ("ufs" or "ffs"), and neither is particularly efficient at handling a directory of more than 10k files or so. And it's not usually the lookup of a single file that's a problem; it's listing the directory (when doing index synchronization) that will be slow.
Other options now exist that improve this quite a bit. On Linux, there's reiserfs; on BSD, there's lfs, and some enhancements to ffs as part of the "FFSv2" project.
-- -- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>