"Loren M. Lang" lorenl@alzatex.com writes:
A few days ago I installed dovecot stable to replace uw-imap. The install went well and all boxes were converted ok. When accessing the new imap server though, certain operations seem much slower, in particular, moving mail between boxes is very slow, and I have received several complaints from users that the mail server has slowed down. I can't figure out what the slow point is as maildir should be faster than mbox.
What UNIX are you running on, what filesystem and what kind of hardware are we talking about? Is maildir_copy_with_hardlinks set?
I find that there are circumstances on modern hardware when mbox is actually faster than maildir. An Intel box with a good disk system will easily load and traverse a multi-megabyte mbox in the time it takes to do a few seeks on the disk (ie finding the various mails in a maildir).
Of course, on dovecot, you can't have folders in folders with mbox, so it's not really an alternativefor me. But maybe you should try it to compare. If your users mostly do operations on massive amounts of mail, it may be an improvement on modern hardware.
Anders "Quest" Qvist
Ye olde jungle proverb: Even the Phantom must turn on the light to see what's in his goth wardrobe.