On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Aaron W. LaFramboise wrote:
I am excited about this new mailbox format. I expect that this caching system with cause load average to plummet on busy IMAP servers, particularly with clients that like to poll.
I don't have good numbers about the effect of sortcaching yet. My tests have all been done on our test IMAP server system, which only a few people use.
The big benefit of mix is the index and the smaller files. There's a number of other little things throughout mix format that individually probably don't make much difference but collectively make a large difference.
What do you mean by "clients that like to poll"? When I think of polling, I think of ordinary IMAP NOOP-polling. You must be talking about something different.
I am curious, though, if there is yet any mechanism for detecting mailbox corruption. I see that mailboxes are often easy to fix just by regenerating the appropriate cache, but is this a condition that c-client will be able to detect by itself, or will external help be required (eg, a user notices that his messages are messed up)?
Any corruption in the sortcache causes that instance of the sortcache to be abandoned. c-client will just get the data it needs from the messages, and later on write a new sortcache.
Corruption in the other files will generally require external help to repair. The current focus is on corruption prevention/detection. There is some automatic repair capability, but it is largely switched off.
The problem is that since no corruption has happened yet, I don't yet know how mix mailboxes break. Consequently, I don't know yet what is prudent for c-client to do on its own and what needs manual help. So I'm taking the cautious approach of "do no harm" pending a better understanding.
I definitely intend to write an external mailbox reconstruction tool.
I will try testing the mix snapshot next week to predict how much it will alter the performance of my present mail setup. Maybe I'll find a bug. :)
OK, thanks. I won't be doing much further work on this until August, but I'll certainly collect all the reports. I expect that I'll be quite busy.
-- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list Imap-uw@u.washington.edu https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
