[Dovecot] Migration questions...

[Curtis Maloney]

Richard Hobbs wrote:
> My colleague has mentioned something of interest... can dovecot keep the
> index files in RAM? If so, the performance will obviously be *so* much
> better than running them off the hard disks.

My understanding was that in-memory indicies are discarded on logout. 
They're of benefit generally in cases where (a) you are distributing your 
servers and don't want to risk indicies over NFS, or (b) your users are 
doing POP drive-bys, and not storing on the server (though I thought there 
was a "don't bother indexing at all" for this).

> This also raises questions about what happens if the machine is powered
> off etc... but it's UPSd etc... so if it were to rebuild it's indexes
> every time it was booted up, that wouldn't be the end of the world.

Dovecot will rebuild its indices when it needs to -- either they're not 
there, or they're deemed invalid (corrupted, etc).  Except in the case of 
dbox, they are a bonus only -- not essential.

You could even reduce your backup footprint by omitting them.

-- 
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net