[Dovecot] New mailbox format

[Dan Hollis]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Jack Bailey wrote:
> Todd Vierling wrote:
>> It mostly has to do with the filesystem being used.  The System V based
>> extended filesystems (which most people know as "ext2" and "ext3") have the
>> same history as the BSD filesystem ("ufs" or "ffs"), and neither is
>> particularly efficient at handling a directory of more than 10k files or 
>> so.
>> And it's not usually the lookup of a single file that's a problem; it's
>> listing the directory (when doing index synchronization) that will be slow.
> ext3 directories are hash databases, much faster than linear 
> searches/listings.

not by default. it's a currently very-beta extension to ext3.

>> Other options now exist that improve this quite a bit.  On Linux, there's
>> reiserfs; on BSD, there's lfs, and some enhancements to ffs as part of the
>> "FFSv2" project.
> Last I heard Reiser was dropped by RedHat.  It's still an option on some 
> Linux distros, e.g. CentOS.

reiser was never supported by redhat. can't drop something you never had. 
redhat bankrolls ext3 development so of course reiserfs is competition. 
every other distro on the entire planet basically supports reiserfs 
though. with mandrake it's default for example. redhat doesnt support 
_anything_ except ext3 actually. xfs and jfs and everything else is 
"unsupported".

-Dan