On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Nancy Lin wrote:
The default mix mailbox size is 1MB. I was wondering if most people have
stuck w/ that default size or changed it to some other value. I'm trying to
figure out what a good mailbox size is. With 1GB+ mailboxes, it seems that
1MB mailbox size would give me too many little files.....
I think that we are all trying to figure this out.
I note that in the mh, news, Cyrus, and maildir worlds, every message gets
its own file; yet many sites seem to be quite happy with that state of
affaird. That represents the worst-case scenario with mix.
1MB was mostly an ad-hoc value. Our system management boys and girls felt
that 10MB was too large; they want to avoid excessive backups. An
experimental predecessor to mix used 800K which I felt was too small.
1MB seemed to be a nice, easy to explain and understand value. But as you
noticed, I made it a #define so that people could play with other values.
I'd be interested to hear what your results are with trying various
values.
Another question which has come up is the possibility of compressing a
mailbox; that is, unifying small data files into a larger data file. I
have it on my list to write a tool to do this, but I wonder if such a tool
would really be of benefit since it would force a new backup.
I guess that we all have to acquire some understanding of the relative
cost of an extra inode vs. backup costs.
-- 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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