On Tue Jun 9 14:15:29 EDT 2009, [email protected] wrote: > With mail2fs I leave messages alone and use all kinds of mail lists > that contain just relative paths to actual messages. Perhaps nupas > could do the same. >
i think that essential strategy is a winner. upas would use .idx files. so the general plan would be to never delete messages. they're in the dump anyway. just delete them from the index. so that seems simple, why isn't that done already? first, i should point out that there are some complicating assumptions i have. our heavy users are receiving about 1000 messages a day after spam filtering. it would be pretty easy to accumulate a million messages. also, it's important for imap support to be able to scan several hundred mailboxes in short order. hopefully that's enough context to understand the two basic problems i see: 1. the mdir format is limited by the underlying fs in the number of messages that can be efficiently stored. (my previous tests with ken's fs on a pIII machine showed that 100k was a lower upper bound.) a million-message index would be ~600mb on-disk. 2. upas/fs needs memory proportinal to the number of messages in the mailbox. and clients need to read directories that are sized in proportion to the number of messages. #1 seems straightforward to fix. #2 seems more fundamental. - erik
