[Dovecot] Users with large (4GB) inboxes crippling dovecot

[Scott Haneda]

On May 28, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Scott Silva wrote:

> on 5-28-2009 9:36 AM Timo Sirainen spake the following:
>> On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 02:07 -0700, robforrest wrote:
>>> What is happening is that as users log in (via thunderbird), they  
>>> are shown
>>> the contents of their mailboxes.  However, when they try and  
>>> access a given
>>> email, they get no response even if they wait upwards of 10  
>>> minutes.  I
>>> believe that the problem has arisen from their huge inboxes,  
>>> several users
>>> have inboxes in excess of 4GB.
>>
>> mbox_very_dirty_syncs = yes would probably make these mailboxes  
>> usable
>> without having to split anything or convert to Maildir. That requires
>> Dovecot v1.0+ of course.
>>
> The indexing improvements in 1.0 would probably help a lot also. I  
> have
> several large mboxes and also some gzipped log storage boxes and 1.1  
> is fairly
> speedy with them. A full re-index in thunderbird takes right at a  
> minute with
> a 6gb gzipped box I just tested.


Can you state what the size of your "several large mboxes" is?  I have  
been curious about this.  My current email server forces me to manage  
my IMAP boxes not based on size, though I believe there is a less than  
2GB limit, but on message count.  Too many messages kills me, the  
storage is one file for each mailbox.

As I am migrating to Dovecot, it would be nice to know what I am in  
for, and if I can simply stop managing this?  My users are going to  
use the server like it is gmail, and never file a darn thing.

One thing I wanted to do, was look at the inbox, and if it is over  
xMB's, rename it to inbox.date which will force the user to deal with  
it.  However, if there is no need to do this, and Dovecot can handle  
it, then I would prefer to skip the intrusion on my users.

What happens in Dovecot if one inbox is massive and in fact hurting  
performance.  Does that performance hit trickle down to all users, or  
just that one user?

Thank you, and looking forward to being 100% Doevcot here in a few  
weeks.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *