[Dovecot] distributed mdbox

[Timo Sirainen]

On 23.3.2012, at 19.11, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

> I assume you do still have some minor locking/performance issues with
> the INBOX, even with Director, when LDA and the user MUA are both
> hitting the INBOX index and mbox files.  You'll still see this with
> mdbox, but probably to a lesser degree if you use a smallish
> mdbox_rotate_size value.  To mitigate this INBOX locking you could go
> with a dual namespaces, using maildir or sdbox for the INBOX and mdbox
> for the other user mail folders.


The biggest difference is that mbox requires read locks, mdbox doesn't. mdbox lock waits are very similar to maildir's. Of course, I don't know about the cluster filesystems' internal locking, but I thought it was even worse with Maildir than with mbox because it had to get a read lock for each read file, but I guess this depends on the filesystem.