This topic has come up before. I ended up deferring action because
analysis suggests that the problem is more cosmetic than anything else.
My analysis suggested that the cost of a "cleanup" tool would be greater
than its benefit.
UNIX filesystems have been subjected to mh, maildir, netnews, Cyrus, etc.
mailstores for many many years; and mix will always do better.
The (still-unwritten) convert-to-mix tool will write multiple data files
instead of the single huge data file written by mailutil. Although the
convert-to-mix tool won't use c-client to write the mix format, it will
use c-client to *read* the source mailbox; thus it would be capable of
doing a mix->mix conversion. So, given an extreme situation (like a mix
directory with 50,000 files...) you will be able to do this.
I wouldn't bother for a mailbox that only has a few hundred files.
The convert-to-mix tool is on one of my front burners, for what it's
worth.
A prophylatic measure that you could take is to increase the size of
MIXDATAROLL from its current size of MEGABYTE to a larger value such as
10*MEGABYTE. You probably want the MIXDATAROLL size to be large enough so
that a single data file handles a day's worth of incoming mail -- you
don't want the incoming spam to cause multiple rolls. On the other hand,
increasing MIXDATAROLL potentially makes backups more expensive.
I really don't know where the sweet spot for MIXDATAROLL is. I suspect
that it is somewhere between 1 and 10 megabytes, but that's more of a
guess than anything else. The sweet spot may change over time, or even be
enterprise-specific.
I'm hoping that those of you in the user community who experiment with
different settings for MIXDATAROLL share your experiences with this list.
Thanks!
On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Chris Picciotto wrote:
An interesting symptom of using MIX format seems to be emerging. As mail is
received (often 1MB+ attachments) then deleted, the net result over time is
that there are many small .mix??????? files left behind in the directory. I
have an INBOX which is kept reasonably tidy (100 or so messages) but the
INBOX directory has many many small files left behind.
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
_______________________________________________
Imap-uw mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
