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

[Kyle Wheeler]

On Friday, May 29 at 09:46 AM, quoth Curtis Maloney:
> This is certainly one advantage dbox and maildir have -- not being 
> limited to the FS file size limit per folder.

That's not *entirely* accurate. Certainly no single message can exceed 
the 2GB limit even with maildir, and the other issue that begins to 
come up is the impact/effect of large numbers of files. Depending on 
the filesystem (I'm assuming ext2?), there's probably a hard limit on 
the number of files per directory, and almost certainly there's a big 
performance penalty for that many files. To get good performance with 
Maildir and really large folders, you need a filesystem that can 
handle large numbersof files. Ext3 has directory hashing, ReiserFS is 
good... I believe XFS and several others have tackled the problem as 
well (I don't know about FFS).

That said... eGADS - a real life FC4 in the wild?!?! According to 
fedoraproject.org:

    For 20030101-20050607 there are a potential 863 CVE named
    vulnerabilities that could have affected FC4 packages. 759 (88%)
    of those are fixed because FC4 includes an upstream version that
    includes a fix, 10 (1%) are still outstanding, and 94 (11%) are
    fixed with a backported patch.

That would make me a little nervous.... that's just the issues over 
the course of two years, ending in 2005 (FOUR years ago).

~Kyle
-- 
I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, 
how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.
                                                    -- Edsger Dijkstra
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