[Dovecot] Please advise on very fast search

[Timo Sirainen]

On 14.11.2011, at 16.35, Alexander Chekalin wrote:

> 1. mdbox uses 'a lot' files (m.1, m.2 ... etc), and the default size if 2Mb. Looks like not even every message can fit into such storage container volume (nowadays we used to see messages of 20Mb and even more).

The messages are never split into multiple files. So if you have a 20 MB message, it gets stored into its own m.* file.

> Should I tune it (at least mdbox_rotate_size and mdbox_rotate_interval) or its size is on purpose? As for now I store each day's messages in separate IMAP folders (mailboxes), which gives me 2000-6000 messages and 2-5 Gb (on disk) per folder.

The main problem with larger mdbox files is that if you expunge messages, there's more data to write when packing the data into a new file. I don't really know the "best" value for mdbox_rotate_size setting. But even a 2 MB mdbox file can contain thousands of small mails, so it's not too bad..