[Dovecot] Please advise on very fast search

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 11/15/2011 1:02 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-11-15 at 12:26 -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> 
>> This is why I recommended mbox in the first place.  If your only writes
>> to these mailbox files are appends of new messages, mbox is the best
>> format by far.  It's faster at appending than any other format, and it's
>> faster for searching than any other.
> 
> Just as long as you're not simultaneously trying to read and write the
> mbox file (or just write in 2+ sessions). Then there's a lot waiting on
> locks. (mdbox has no read locks, and its write locks are very short
> lived.)

Of course.  My understanding of Alexander's workflow is that copies of
all daily new mail are written to an IMAP mailbox via some MTA bcc rule
or sieve rule.  A nightly script moves the daily mail to another mailbox
created and named by date.  These named mailboxes are then used for
backup and the search function, but are never written to again.  So I
assume there is no simultaneous read/write of the archive mailboxes he
performs searches on.  It's possible I don't fully understand
Alexander's work flow yet.

-- 
Stan