Re: unable to open mailbox
RobertHoltzman put forth on 1/10/2010 1:01 AM:
> On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 08:09:57PM -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> RobertHoltzman put forth on 1/9/2010 5:45 PM:
>>> On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 10:27:33AM -0200, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote:
>>>> Klistvud wrote:
>>>>> I've heard maildir is more robust than mbox in that regard. Can anybody
>>>>> confirm if that's true or not?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'd say so. Since each message is a file, if one file gets corrupted
>>>> only that message will be affected.
>>>
>>> But it slows down searches.
>>
>> That's the general wisdom regarding search performance, but I'm not so sure that
>> its correct for modern systems and software. I haven't located any modern
>> apples-apples benchmarks of mbox vs maildir. Dovecot supports both mailbox
>> formats and its mbox code has been heavily optimized. It would be nice to see
>> this http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/ benchmark performed today but
>> testing dovecot-mbox vs dovecot-maildir.
>
> One of the Alpine (ex)devs claims it's true. If I ever get the time I'll
> see about testing it one of the distros on my desktop box. Intuitively
> it sounds right as a search would entail opening and closing many files
> as opposed to one with mbox.
I completely agree with this position. Technically it makes sense. This is one
reason I went with mbox on my Dovecot server. I'd just like to see some recent
modern benchmarks proving so and to what degree. My gut instinct says that mbox
is faster, but probably not to such an extent that it would really make a
difference from the "human latency" standpoint. I have a list mail file with
10,600 messages in it. The longest simple body search time I've had through
T-Bird (server side search) is about 8-10 seconds wall clock time. If I'd
chosen maildir instead of mbox, and maildir took 16-20 seconds for the same
search, that's not a huge difference in human waiting terms--unless your daily
job entails searching mail files/folders all day long. This is on a lightly
loaded server. I'd like to see data for heavily loaded mbox and maildir servers.
--
Stan
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