[Dovecot] mbox vs. maildir storage block waste

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

On Thu, 2012-11-08 at 17:54 -0800, Robin wrote:
> The performance is surprisingly bad ... doing almost everything. 
>  Searches through IMAP, bulk importation of mail folders, large
> numbers of simultaneous mail deliveries, you name it.
Have you made systematic tests? I.e. compared times for all of these
with those from the different dovecot backends.


> There wasn't a task that the dbmail setup performed faster than
> Dovecot, in either low or high load situations.
Which backend did you use?



> When pressed on this lack of performance, I was instructed to "add
> more RAM" to the DB machine, and that for ideal performance I should
> have more RAM than my mailbox sizes.  *sigh*  This sounds great for a
> very small installation, but this clearly is not something that
> scales.
Yeah... that’s truly disappointing...

Do you have detailed numbers?

I guess you’ve "only" tried dbmail?




> The dbmail folk are earnest and hard-working, and I don't mean to cast
> the slightest bit of negativity on their project.  I think the
> assumptions about what SQL servers can do well often doesn't square
> with the reality of many applications that people try to fit them
> into.
hmm... 



> remove filesystem journaling, write barriers, etc on the mail db
> mountpoint.
All something I wouldn’t want to do on my production systems ;)




Thanks for your detailed information :)


Cheers,
Chris.
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