15.06.2023 19:30, Michael Grant via dovecot wrote:
This morning, it looks like it’s working. It took a long time to decompress the compressed mail folder.
You’re right, it shows up in imap as “2021.gz”.
Up to now, I was decompressing it if I needed it, this is great, saves me a step. I don’t need to modify it, just search it sometimes.
FWIW, I found modern filesystems (such as btrfs) does an excellent job at compressing files. It is more, modern compression algorithms (such as zstd) compresses better than gzip and does it faster. And when the compression support is part of the filesystem, you don't need to worry about decompressing it anymore or check if the tools you're using support (de)compression or not, - it just works.
btrfs itself has its own interesting.. properties, one has to be careful and know a few easy rules when using its advanced features.
For example, in context of compression, when compression is enabled but the data is written to a given file in small portions and especially with fsyncs in between, btrfs will mark this file as "not compressible" (m attribute), even if the data itself is actually well-compressible. This is an optimization by btrfs to avoid spending time compressing this stuff. If you know the data is compressible, you'll have to set +c attribute instead (like force-compress) and recompress it as a whole with btrfs filesystem defrag -czstd filename (this operation is safe wrt fsyncs, due to CoW features). So this is something to keep an eye on, but once you know how it works, and do some book-keeping, it works fine.
/mjt