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

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 15:10 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

> If Charles is currently using maildir or sdbox with Dovecot's default
> body search, how much would his body search performance increase by
> switching to mbox or mdbox, relatively speaking?  Obviously searching a
> few hundred emails will be very fast with any mailbox format.  How about
> body searching a list mail folder with 10k messages?

It's mostly about disk seek times. If Maildir files happen to be written
to disk in right order and right next to each others, I'd guess the
performance is almost the same as with mbox/mdbox. With SSDs the Maildir
performance should be pretty good too. Here are some SSD numbers when
searching from mailbox with 10k messages:

Maildir, uncached: 6.7s
Maildir, cached: 2.2s
mdbox, uncached: 2.8s
mdbox, cached: 2.0s