[Dovecot] How safe is mbox_very_dirty_syncs?

[Tomi Hakala]

Chris Wakelin wrote:
> Now we aren't running UW-IMAP at all, how safe is mbox_very_dirty_syncs
> assuming the only other process writing to mailboxes is our MTA (exim)
> which simply appends messages to the end?

I have been using mbox_very_dirty_syncs from the time it was added. If
I remember correctly there might have been some problems way back then
but nothing in last 6 months or so and I have been hitting Dovecot with
millions of messages during this time.

> Is it safer still using Dovecot 1.0-alphas and the LDA?

I would always use Dovecot LDA. It does have some extra overhead due
indexing, which is not so bad thing, but it also adds X-UID, Status,
X-Keywords and Content-Lenght headers to mboxes which decreases need
for writes and offset changes on mboxes while opening the mailbox.

> Does it matter if there are concurrent connections to the mailbox?

No if your mbox_*_locks are set correctly.

-- 
Tomi Hakala