Charles Marcus put forth on 11/3/2010 3:32 PM:
On 2010-11-03 4:10 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Charles, how many messages are in the IMAP folders you are body searching?
Some have as many as 25,000... and yes, I'm currently using maildir, but have been considering switching to mdbox, but its still a bit too new for me to be really comfortable doing so...
I'd be hesitant there as well. Forgive me as I can't recall your server/store setup Charles. If your mail store is currently on EXT3 or Reiser3 atop Linux, and the filesystem is on a multi-disk striped RAID device of level 5, 6, or 10, hardware RAID or mdraid, you may want to switch the mail store over to an XFS filesystem. It will yield better overall performance for your Dovecot server, and would help a bit with body searches of large numbers of maildir files. This is assuming you're using a modern kernel, say 2.6.33 or later, which have seriously improved XFS performance with lots of small files. It will yield superior performance with mbox, mdbox, and sdbox as well. It's simply a superior filesystem.
Obviously this will require some unallocated free space on your RAID device, or another attached RAID device. If you have such free space, formatting it with XFS and moving your mail store over a weekend may well be worth the trouble.
-- Stan