[Dovecot] Best (fastest + most stable) search config...

[Stan Hoeppner]

Charles Marcus put forth on 11/3/2010 3:32 PM:
> On 2010-11-03 4:10 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> Charles, how many messages are in the IMAP folders you are body searching?
> 
> Some have as many as 25,000... and yes, I'm currently using maildir, but
> have been considering switching to mdbox, but its still a bit too new
> for me to be really comfortable doing so...

I'd be hesitant there as well.  Forgive me as I can't recall your
server/store setup Charles.  If your mail store is currently on EXT3 or
Reiser3 atop Linux, and the filesystem is on a multi-disk striped RAID
device of level 5, 6, or 10, hardware RAID or mdraid, you may want to
switch the mail store over to an XFS filesystem.  It will yield better
overall performance for your Dovecot server, and would help a bit with
body searches of large numbers of maildir files.  This is assuming
you're using a modern kernel, say 2.6.33 or later, which have seriously
improved XFS performance with lots of small files.  It will yield
superior performance with mbox, mdbox, and sdbox as well.  It's simply a
superior filesystem.

Obviously this will require some unallocated free space on your RAID
device, or another attached RAID device.  If you have such free space,
formatting it with XFS and moving your mail store over a weekend may
well be worth the trouble.

-- 
Stan