What you're doing differently is that you're _keeping_ the messages
(255K of them) whereas I purge any mailboxes with >10K messages. If
you choose to use Maildir, I'd advise that you configure your system
to limit the number of messages maintained in a particular
directory. I think funny things can happen on ext2 filesystems when
directory nodes contain >2^15 entries.
Really? I've got a directory with 700,000 files in it, and while
first-access takes a minute to pull into cache, after that it
works fine.
$ dir /data/01
total 12148
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Oct 16 2005 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 16 2005 ../
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Oct 4 2005 051003.2352/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 49152 Oct 15 2005 lost+found/
drwxrwxr-x 6 me people 4096 Jun 14 2005 share/
drwxrwx--x 259 me me 12345344 Apr 30 15:07 temp/