On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 11:24 -0800, Jeffrey Nikoletich wrote:
Also is there is hard limit on the amount of folders dovecot can handle? I have a user who has over 3000 folder (including subfolders) that is having issues with delays in loading, moving, and deleting messages.
Are you sure those problems are even caused by the number of folders? There are only two issues I can think of:
Client LISTs all folders, which can take a while to download. Clients don't usually do this very often.
Filesystem is being slow. If you're using filesystem with directory indexes (and most are nowadays indexed) I don't think 2) should be much of a problem. And I think even without indexes OS would have cached the directory entries in a way that accessing the same directory would always be fast.
So have you looked at other potential problems, like if deleting messages is slow and deletion is done by move-to-Trash, does the Trash have tens of thousands of messages?
And at least ext3 already limits the number of folders that can be created with Maildir++ to 31998. That's probably good enough as a folder quota. :)