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

[Scott Haneda]

On May 28, 2009, at 1:12 PM, Scott Silva wrote:

>> 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.

Thanks for the reply..

> My largest is about 5+ GB gzipped (I thought it was 6gb until I just  
> checked),
> but I am on a 64 bit server and don't have a 2 gb filesize limit. I  
> have
> several users with 2 to 3 GB inboxes on IMAP, and don't get any  
> complaints. I

Are you saying that you can gzip a mailbox, and Dovecot will then  
somehow uncompress that and send the data back out to the Desktop  
Client as a normal looking IMAP box?

I have never heard of this tactic, and I am not finding any references  
to it on google, though I am probably just not understanding it and  
looking at the wrong search terms.

> have been considering going to maildir, and scripting some stuff  
> like moving
> messages older than 30 days out of the inbox, and also purging any  
> messages
> marked as deleted, and also older stuff in the trash. Maildir is  
> much easier
> with this since it is one file per message instead of one file per  
> folder.
>
> If one user does manage to really hose a box, the re-indexing that  
> dovecot can
> slow the system for a little while, but it clears up pretty fast.  
> Only rarely
> have I had to intervene and kill a process.
>
> The one place where dovecot might be less than stellar is with pop3  
> access
> from outlook if they leave mail on the server. It can get confused  
> sometimes
> and re-download everything, but this is Outlook's problem, not  
> dovecot's.


I used to keep an eye on these clients, and set a "never leave mail on  
server" setting on my old server.  Not sure how to do this in Dovecot,  
though if I have my way, everyone is going to be on IMAP, though they  
are free to use it like POP if they want.

Thanks again for your reply, impressive stats to me, considering the  
stats of where I am coming from.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *