[Dovecot] Re: dovecot Digest, Vol 26, Issue 5

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Todd Burroughs wrote:
>>>>> How can I debug this problem? I'm running dovecot .99.14 on a Mac Mini
>>>>
>>>> (OS X 10.3,  512 mb, 80 gb).
>>>
>>>
>>
>>> mbox or maildir?
>>
>>
>> Maildir.
>>
>> Listing or opening the directory via the OS is rather slow, btw,
> 
> 
> This is one of the problems that I've heard about with maildir.  If you
> have a lot of messages in a folder, it may be slow.  If listing (i.e.,
> "ls -l") is slow, then maildir will likely be slow as well.  maildir
> relies on the filesystem, so if it isn't good at dealing with a lot
> of files in a directory, maildir won't work well.
 >
> Have you tried a newer version?  I use the latest from CVS and it seems
> pretty good.  So far, I've seen no corruption that dovecot hasn't dealt

I think I've got the problem diagnosed to be outside of dovecot. I've 
posted to Apple's board,

http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?50@852.bHHyawkY1ge.0@.68b15954


The trouble is that it's only slow on that volume, while a USB harddisk 
  is much faster. Also, I have no clue how I can dig into MacOS for 
further diagnosis.

Hi,

I hope I'm in the right place. I'm running the dovecot 0.99.14 imap 
server on my mac mini (10.3), and see abysmal performance. I suspect 
that it is due to some directory listing problem with the root volume, 
which holds my IMAP Mail repository (maildir format).

maagd:~/Maildir$ time du .sent/
(..)
real 1m13.127s
user 0m0.050s
sys 0m1.590s

If I try the same with a similar HD (40gb, 2.5", 4200 rpm, HFS+ 
journaled) mounted over USB2, I get nearly instantaneous performance.

maagd:~$ time du /Volumes/Naamloos\ 1/test/.sent/
220240 /Volumes/Naamloos 1/test/.sent//cur
8 /Volumes/Naamloos 1/test/.sent//new
0 /Volumes/Naamloos 1/test/.sent//tmp
234784 /Volumes/Naamloos 1/test/.sent/

real 0m3.492s
user 0m0.080s
sys 0m0.980s

maagd:~$ mount
/dev/disk0s3 on / (local, journaled)
/dev/disk1s3 on /Volumes/Naamloos 1 (local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

Any tips how can I further diagnose this problem?

thanks!



-- 
  Han-Wen Nienhuys - hanwen at xs4all.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen