[Dovecot] rule of thumb for indexing overhead

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Fri Aug 24 19:12:56 EEST 2007


On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 21:55 -0700, WJCarpenter wrote:
> I realize it's hard to be precise about this, but does anyone have a
> feel or rule of thumb for a couple of aspects of indexing overhead?
> 
> 1.  Proportionally, how much space does it take for all 4 files?  If I
> want to give my users a quota of 100 MB for messages, how much real
> space should I plan for so that I won't run out of space for indexing?

It really depends on what IMAP client is being used. Something like
10-20% maybe.

> 2.  What's the overhead in rebuilding index files?  Suppose I use an
> LDA other than dovecot, so at least the INBOX index is frequently
> getting out of date.  Does it cost much (in CPU, memory, and disk IO)
> to rebuild the index files?  (I'm using maildir.)

Indexes aren't normally "rebuilt", they're "updated". And the update
overhead is practically nothing with maildir.

I just wrote this: http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Indexing

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