Mark Crispin wrote:
> UW (and Panda) try damn hard to be compatible with even the most ancient
> stupid things that people do with mbox files; and take a considerable
> performance hit for doing so.
Probably from having read your rantings on the topic before, I'd not do
any of those things...but memories, while rarely ever lost, are sometimes
depointerized through lack of use, so anything's possible.
> The issues to be aware of in Dovecot are:
>
> [2] Dovecot runs multi-threaded (which itself requires OS support), and
> the threads exchange state information. Among other things, this allows
> significant performance benefits and multiple read-write access to the
> same mbox format mailbox...as long as Dovecot is the only consumer of the
> mbox file. Once again, UW IMAP did not have the luxury of being able to
> assume that.
---
Seems to be fine with me using the 'mbox.lock' locking files to
gain exclusive access. I believe was a compatibility setting somewhere.
> The nice thing about mix format is that there was no need to be
> compatible
> with ancient idiocies; and as a result mix is so much faster. Even
> without the threading, mix is probably faster than Dovecot on mbox
> because
> even Dovecot has to do some mbox operations the hard way.
---
I think the current version of dovecot does suport 'mix' (folders and
messages in same?), but I didn't test it -- didn't want to screw up my
working mail store. Maybe I'll eventually feel braver, out of curiosity.
>
> Nonetheless, if you really need mbox format, and are sure that you won't
> be running dinoware and/or doing stupid things like access via NFS, then
> Dovecot is definitely an option to consuder.
>
> If you want to use maildir format, I would go further and say that
> Dovecot
> is the ONLY choice; do not use an unsupported third-party driver in UW
> and
> especially do not use Courier.
Doesn't Cyrus use maildir format, or is Cyrus=Courier? One dir, many little
files? just seemed likea mess to me. But my 80+ active mailboxes might
seem a mess to some. No reason to NFS -- the IMAP server should be
where the source files were and
use it to mitigate access...using NFS and IMAP... two means to access same
read/write share would almost inevitably lead to a mess. I'm still trying
synchronize everything between smb and local views of regular files, and end
up with observable quirks.
One of the reasons that drew me to Dovecot was that my OS does support
threads, so I wanted to use use things that provide multi-thread usage to
better parallelize my workload -- it's the only way I'll ever do a
better job
of processor utilization.
Thanks for the appraisal -- makes me feel like I wasn't crazy for moving the
direction I did, given my hardware/software setup.
-linda
_______________________________________________
Imap-uw mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
