Richard Westlake wrote:
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Erik Kangas wrote:
I would be interest in what people consider being a reasonable maximum
INBOX size and if there is any online resources covering the problems
caused by large INBOX.
Most of the accounts on our email serve have an INBOX smaller then
150Mbyte, the rest are smaller then 500Mbyte, which is an improvement as
we did have, files larger then 1Gbyte.
...
I would be curious if Erik Kangas or anyone else has any suggestions on
how to educate senior staff on the "pleasures of small inboxes"
Hello,
What is a "too large" inbox depends on many factors. Lets assume you use
mbx-formatted mailboxes:
* The throughput of your I/O system is the central variable. I recommend
very fast SCSI drives in a RAID array that gives you a boost from striping
* How physically large the files are
* How fragmented files are
* How many messages are in the files.
* How busy the server [I/O] is
I.e. you can have a "small" mailbox (say 75 Mb) that has many thousands of
messages that will be much much slower than a larger mailbox with many
fewer messages due to all the work the IMAP server has to do.
You will also see that as your server gets busier with more users and more
fragmented files, the bigger folders become slower and slower for obvious
reasons.
For education, I would recommend pitching small mailboxes as in the users'
best interests as they will be more productive, access things faster, etc.
Watch out for:
* People who use POP to check their email, leave it on the server, and let
it build up. This is REALLY inefficient as the INBOX grows.
* People who subscribe to all folders in their account - thus having their
email client select them all every few minutes (Entourage will do this if
you are not careful).
I heard Mark Crispin say that they were working on a new email folder
format that would be much faster ... i.e. one where the metadata and/or
header data would be stored in separate index files so that access would be
much less dependent on folder size or number of messages. Can we have a
progress report? :)
Best,
-Erik Kangas
LuxSci.com
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