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Re: kmail corrupts emails [solved]



Derek Broughton wrote:
> Randy Kramer wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Tuesday 27 September 2005 09:27 am, Derek Broughton wrote:
>>
>>>Why do you think Maildir would perform worse for folders with thousands
>>>of
>>>emails?  Everything I've read suggests it will perform better - and more
>>>reliably.
>>
>>First a quick (but dumb, I should look it up) question.  Does Linux do the
>>thing that Dos/Windows does (used to do?) of each file requiring a minimum
>>space (one cluster?), or does it vary by filesystem?
> 
> 
> It varies decidedly between the different filesystems.

I think the restriction that you're more likely to run into is the
number of inodes available (which are predetermined when you setup an
ext2/3 filesystem).

However, ReiserFS is *much* more efficient when you have thousands of
files in one directory, because it uses a hashing algorithm to determine
where the required file is (or starts) in the filesystem.  This is
something I know about (hashing) based on my experience with Pick
database systems, which also use hashing and are incredibly fast at
keyed record retrieval (as well as entire file/table traversal).

I've used ReiserFS in the past mainly for it's journalling capability,
which at the time was more complete than ext3's (this was on a RH6.2
system with the 2.4.x series kernels).  As my customers at the time were
very likely to simply switch the system off (for any reason, including
not knowing how a particular application works that they'd wandered
into), this feature saw a lot of (successful) use!

[snip]

-- 
PeteJ



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