Jon Nelson writes:
I recently gave Dovecot a try. It's not nearly as featureful (or seemingly as stable) as courier-imap, but it has one very important distinction:
It is *wicked* fast.
It made me think - indexes are what makes dovecot so fast. What would it take to add similar indexing capabilities to courier-imap?
By showing a need for it without using the word âbenchmarkâ.
People do not use IMAP servers to run benchmarks. People use IMAP servers to read mail. All IMAP-reading mail clients that might be considered popular will cache all message metadata. When you're scrolling through the folder's index the IMAP client is not going to issue a server request for every new message that's scrolled into view. All of the message metadata will be cached. So if the mail client wants to resort the folder it won't ask the server to do it, it'll do the job itself.
So, if you want to evaluate indexing you need to take a reasonably popular IMAP client, log its IMAP commands, then show how indexing will help. Arbitrary benchmarks won't cut it, and adding indexes for the benefit of a lesser-used IMAP tool will come at the expense of greater overhead for the rest of the IMAP clients, which makes no sense.
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