[Dovecot] Expected size of index-files?

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

> Tobias Balle-Petersen schreef:
>> Hello...
>>
>> Im considering moving my index-files to a RAID1. How big do these
>> files get? What should I plan for?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Tobias
>>
> since 1 july 2007 i store all mails to this list in 1 folder
> (Maildir-format)
>
> the size of this (and the indexes) is:
> 31M     cur
> 80K     dovecot.index
> 6.8M    dovecot.index.cache
> 44K     dovecot.index.log
> 136K    dovecot.index.log.2
> 4.0K    dovecot-keywords
> 164K    dovecot-uidlist
> 4.0K    new
> 4.0K    tmp
>
> so, on average maybe 20%-30%  of the size of your messages ?
>
>

On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Jan van den Berg wrote:

> That's actually quite a lot.
> Consider you run 100k+ mailboxes (1GB each) and you would move to
> Dovecot this will be a huge chunk out of your storage.
> Is using dovecot index files really that much faster than running
> ":INDEX=MEMORY" ? Where could I find some benchmarks about this?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jan
>

I think a lot would depend on your average message size. Here's another 
data point. At my old company's server:

43,438 messages
2,350,260,769 bytes
per-message ~ 54K

~3,000 folders:
     486 dovecot-keywords
    2675 dovecot-uidlist
    2967 dovecot.index
    2456 dovecot.index.cache
    2967 dovecot.index.log
     183 dovecot.index.log.2
     251 maildirfolder
      26 subscriptions

total non-message file sizes:
      93,010,227 bytes
/ 2,350,260,769 bytes
=~ 3.9 percent


And, taking into account what Timo wrote about it being client-dependent, 
most of the users there are using Outlook.

Best,
Ben