On 14/05/2009 5:11 PM, Steffen Kaiser wrote:
On Wed, 13 May 2009, Richard Hobbs wrote:
The main complaint we have from users is that their IMAP Inbox, with 5000 emails in it takes ages to appear, and no amount of coaxing will convince them to split their inbox into multiple folders.
Oh, we serve Maildir via Dovecot IMAP and 5000 messages per folder are a wimp. Problems start if the user: We are having some performancec issues on our server at the moment - all I can put it down to is the large size of some maildirs. Eg.
ls -ld Maildir/curmight show a directory >20Mb in size for some of our users (20-30k emails). (Performance issues == everything is running ok then all of a sudden load avg goes through the roof, system cpu time goes crazy. Reading mail grinds to a halt. Then everything recovers just as suddenly and the load avg gradually returns to normal levels) a) hits a 2GB limit on a mailbox in the mail client,b) try to move all their 20'000+ messages at once to an archive folder once a year, when their quota limit is exceeded. This generally causes us problems as well..
With maildir, and especially dovecot, this problem effectively disappears! That's the theory anyway, right? Theory is wonderful when it works :-) I dont know for sure if our problems are caused by what I mentioned above, but it might be worth keeping it in mind.
-- Thanks, Phill Macey (CiSRA IT Services)