Terry Barnum put forth on 2/26/2010 4:20 PM:
The 500MB+, 5k+ message problem is with another mailserver not running postfix/dovecot. It's the reason I've started investigating postfix with your software and so far I"m very happy.
Hi Terry,
If it is remotely a possibility, I'd recommend going with Linux instead of OSX. Going Linux gets you access to the XFS filesystem which gives the best overall performance for maildirs. It seems very likely that your current production server is suffering at 5K files and 500MB mailboxen due to a deficient filesystem, among other things. I'm partial to Debian Stable (Lenny) myself. I use mbox with XFS due to the fact I archive all my list mail and thus generate some pretty large mbox files, growing every day. If I decide to switch to or add maildirs later, I've already got the filesystem that performs best for both worlds.
If you must go with OSX, avoid HFS+ and go with ZFS. ZFS performance is likely inferior to XFS for maildirs, but it would still be much better than HFS+.
-- Stan