To get benefits of Dovecot indexing you would need to interface Mutt to IMAP or else you will scan the Maildir directory each time Mutt is started.
You need to know more info than just 200,000 messages.
How many mailboxes, users, messages per day etc
Vegard Svanberg wrote, On 18/07/2011 11:27:
What should I expect performance-wise if I put 200000 messages in a Maildir store and use two or three MUAs (mutt and Thunderbird), on an Athlon dual core 2GHz with SATA drives in software RAID (Linux)?
Like; would it be useless/crawling, usable or pretty fast. I imagine MUA startup / first time folder read would be slow, but daily use more or less ok.
Thanks to Dovecot's indexing, I imagine I would be better off interfacing Mutt to Maildir via IMAP and Dovecot rather than accessing Maildir/ directly?