On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 12:13 +0100, James Leifer wrote:
While I'm asking this: how difficult would it be to have multiple physical maildir directories be presented by dovecot as a single IMAP folder? The reason I ask is that many file systems start to slow down noticably once one gets more than about 5000 files in a directory. (Reiser is an exception, but reiser has had other problems of reliability for me.) It would be nice to be able to spread a single folder out over several maildirs to reduce any possible problems from the file system.
Don't pretty much all Linux filesystems handle this well already? Even ext3 is fast nowadays with htree enabled.
This isn't really maildir anymore, maybe rather have a completely new mail store format. I'll probably build one somewhat soon, featuring:
- keep message flags, UIDs and other metadata in Dovecot indexes
- 1..n messages in a single file, eg. 1MB limit per file (unless a single message itself is larger)
- expunging in the middle of file would move the following messages to new file, so it can't get corrupted
- no locks needed for reading