[Dovecot] Migration questions...

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 09:56 -0700, Scott Silva wrote:
> > mbox - "slow" to delete mails - indexing will help this problem, but the
> > filesystem will still have work to do in order to join the two halves of
> > the file.
> Actually, I think a new file is written with everything re-written except the
> deleted message and then linked over the old file or renamed to the old file.
> That is why many clients will just mark them deleted and then you run a
> separate purge step, or the client is set to purge on exit. That is more
> efficient because the big write step is only done once.

It's neither actually. It's about moving data inside the mbox file to
get rid of the expunged messages and then truncating the mbox file. So
this means that if you have a 1 GB mbox file and you delete the first
message Dovecot needs to write 1 GB of data, but if you delete near the
end of file it's going to be fast.

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