On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Andrew Daviel wrote:
.. if I look at the "transfer time" graphs, the Mix format seems to
show more consistent times and be quicker to get an individual message. But
that doesn't show in the summary pages.
mix should also open large mailboxes MUCH faster than any flat file
format.
I'll probably toss a coin and choose, say, XFS and Mix,
which gives me back-compatability with existing files and gets away from huge
inboxes with their subsequent backup problems.
That sounds like a plan.
Have you looked at Maildir format (e.g. Courier) ? It looks similar to
mix, though AFAIK some metadata is coded into the filename rather than
stored in separate files, and it sounds like mix has more capability.
I wouldn't recommend Courier under any circumstances. It violates IMAP
all over the place. If you decide to go to maildir, Dovecot's author
participates in the IMAP community and that alone seems to be reason to go
with him.
I notice that RHEL4 now includes Dovecot and Cyrus imapd, not UW.
I suspect (don't know) that it's based upon a(n incorrect) notion that UW
imapd is under Pine's license.
Cyrus I have not yet tried. (mail delivery and how
to create an inbox seems different for everything, and moreso for Cyrus)
Cyrus is an excellent server; however as you noticed it is a completely
different mail store from any other. Also, ALL access to the mail store
MUST be through Cyrus; if you access local file mailboxes through Pine or
other shell tools then Cyrus is not for you (or at least not for those
local file mailboxes).
Speaking of Pine; the current release version of Pine (4.64) does not
support mix since mix did not exist when that version was released.
Alpine will support mix.
However, you can rebuild Pine 4.64 with the imap-2006[a] toolkit
substituted for the imap-2004g that is bundled with Pine 4.64 in the
pine4.64/imap directory. imap-2006[a] is a drop-in replacement, and using
it will add mix support to Pine.
I've also seen comments, which I do seem to verify, that a filesystem such as
XFS or Reiser is better suited to Maildir/mix structure than
"traditional" ext2/3.
I don't think that it will matter as much with mix, since mix doesn't
chomp on inodes as much as maildir or Cyrus. However, if inode chomping
is a consideration, you do need to choose your filesystem carefully.
Many proprietary UNIX filesystems do quite a bit worse than ext2 when lots
of files pile up in a directory. Even something as modest as 2000 files
in one directory can really slow things down with the wrong filesystem.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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