Maildir ext4 slowness

[Kumar Appaiah <a.kumar@alumni.iitm.ac.in>]

Dear Debian User,

Of late, I've observed that opening my Maildir boxes in Mutt has been
a tad slow. Here is the rough structure:

I have an LVM home directory (ext4), within which I have a folder
called ~/Maildir. This folder has several Maildirs, say inbox,
debian-user etc., each of which gets its mail delivered using
procmail.

tune2fs gives me these features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode
dir_index filetype needs_recovery extent flex_bg sparse_super
large_file huge_file uninit_bg dir_nlink extra_isize

Of late, I've observed that folders with over 1000 messages seem quite
slow to respond (order of 3-4 seconds), which wasn't really happening
in the old days when I was using mboxes. I prefer Maildir since I can
use notmuch to index my mails easily.

Is there something I could to to speed things up? For instance, I
could create a 20 GB file, create another filesystem on it and mount
it as my Maildir, if that would help.

Thanks.

Kumar
-- 
'Ooohh.. "FreeBSD is faster over loopback, when compared to Linux
over the wire". Film at 11.'
		-- Linus Torvalds