[Dovecot] Performance, dovecot vs tpop3d

[Nate]

At 02:52 PM 1/30/2007, Curtis Maloney wrote:
>Hi..
>
>wow.. this is the first time I can recall someone complaining 
>Dovecot is so much SLOWER than their old install.  :P

Sorry. =(  hehe, well we stuck with tpop3d for so long because it was 
so blazing fast.  It was faster than any pop3 client we had ever used 
in the past 10 years.  However, since it's no longer maintained, it 
seemed the right time to move.  Dovecot has such a great userbase 
that it seemed the natural solution!


>Nate wrote:
>>files.  The process takes many minutes to complete.  Is it 
>>rebuilding the index on every login?
>
>The only case I can see where Dovecot would rebuild indexes on 
>_every_ connect would be if you had INDEX=MEMORY in your mail_location.

mail_location = maildir:/var/spool/mail/%d/%n
That is my whole config line, so it stores the indexes within the 
mail directory.  here's a directory listing of the user previously mentioned.
[root at s3 brock]# ls -alh
total 7.4M
drwx------     5 postfix postdrop  304 Jan 30 15:21 .
drwx------  3108 postfix postdrop  79K Jan 30 13:06 ..
drwx------     2 postfix postdrop 939K Jan 30 15:21 cur
-rw-------     1 postfix postdrop 202K Jan 30 15:21 dovecot.index
-rw-------     1 postfix postdrop 5.3M Jan 30 15:21 dovecot.index.cache
-rw-------     1 postfix postdrop  17K Jan 30 15:21 dovecot.index.log
-rw-------     1 postfix postdrop 133K Jan 28 11:18 dovecot.index.log.2
-rw-------     1 postfix postdrop 743K Jan 30 15:19 dovecot-uidlist
drwx------     2 postfix postdrop   48 Jan 30 15:21 new
drwx------     2 postfix postdrop   48 Jan 30 15:19 tmp

For kicks I copied their entire mailspool (minus the index files) to 
a test account and connected to it via telnet.  It took roughly 90 
seconds to build the indexes, then it output the list command.  If I 
disconnect and immediately reconnect it returns a list immediately 
and does not appear to rebuild the index; however, if I wait 5 
minutes and reconnect, it appears to at least somewhat rebuild the 
index (guessing at this).  I see it accessing the individual mail 
files inside the cur/ directory with lsof and it takes about 30 
seconds to retrieve a list.

- Nate