On 25.10.2010, at 23.42, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
It's only for mdbox because they have a known upper size (mdbox_rotate_size). With mbox the only possibility would be to let admin specify how large the files should be preallocated to. And how would the admin know? And should different mailboxes have different preallocated sizes? For example "Drafts" mailbox is unlikely to ever grow very large. And in any case, if you care about performance mbox isn't really the best choice.
Is it still the best choice performer WRT full text search?
mdbox with the preallocation enabled would probably perform better.
I use fts squat, but it seems whenever I do a body search of an IMAP folder that the index is cold, thus I don't often get the benefit of the index.
Yeah, Squat's indexing speed is way too slow. It needs some kind of a redesign there.
Would maildir, dbox, or mdbox give better performance here with a cold index?
The performance problem is with Squat itself, not with the mailbox format.
Full text search is the main reason I've stayed with mbox. I've never noticed any performance issues (not after you recommended I enable very_dirty_syncs that is).
The main problem I see with mbox is that it's rather fragile and I know there are some bugs in Dovecot causing it to crash in some situations with mbox.
Anyhow, it sounds like even if it could somehow be done with mbox it would be pretty difficult to implement, and not provide much ROI as apparently few OPs still use mbox.
Right. If someone wants to do it, it should be somewhat easy to patch it in :)