Actually I took a look inside the folders right after starting up and waited for two hours to let Dovecot work. Saving the whole Maildir into a tar on the same partition also took only 2 hours before. But nothing did change and when looking at activities with top, the server was idle, dovecot not indexing. Also I wasn't able to drag new messages to the folder hierachy.
With courier it takes not more than 5 seconds to download the headers in a folder containing more than 3.000 messages.
Stan Hoeppner schrieb:
So I forced to install the Debisn 7.0 packages with 2.0.15 and finally got the server running, I also restarted the whole machine to empty caches. But the problem I got was that in the huge folder hierarchy the downloaded headers in the individual folders disappeared, some folders showed a few very old messages, some none. Also some subfolders disappeared. I checked this with Outlook and Thunderbird. The difference was, that Thunderbird shows more messages (but not all) than Outlook in some folders, but also none in some others. Outlook brought up a message in some cases, that the connection timed out, although I set the timeout to 60s. ... Anyone a clue what's wrong here? Absolutely. What's wrong is a lack of planning, self education, and
On 1/2/2012 10:17 AM, Preacher wrote: ... patience on the part of the admin.
Dovecot gets its speed from its indexes. How long do you think it takes Dovecot to index 37GB of maildir messages, many thousands per directory, hundreds of directories, millions of files total? Until those indexes are built you will not see a complete folder tree and all kinds of stuff will be missing.
For your education: Dovecot indexes every message and these indexes are the key to its speed. Normally indexing occurs during delivery when using deliver or lmtp, so the index updates are small and incremental, keeping performance high. You tried to do this and expected Dovecot to instantly process it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THVz5aweqYU
If you don't know, that's a coal train car being dumped. 100 tons of coal in a few seconds. Visuals are always good teaching tools. I think this drives the point home rather well.