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On Saturday 05 April 2003 12:05, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 11:51:47AM +0300, Shaul Karl wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 11:15:42PM +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
> > > 
> > >                                                       mbox is more
> > > common (is the "standard"), maildir is newer (and probably better).
> > > 
> > 
> > 
> >   Can you tell in what ways maildir is probably better then mbox?
> 
> It keeps each message in a file, so it's hopefully faster. Deleting
> a 1K message from the middle of a 100MB folder does not cause copying
> of 50MB. I never used it myself (yet?), though, so I do not know what
> difference it has in performance in practice.

I could be wrong, but I always thought that deleting a 1k msg from the middle 
of a 100mb mbox file doesn't cause any copying right away. It just marks the 
msg as deleted by changing a byte or two in its header, and so doesn't show 
it to you anymore.

However that also means you haven't freed up that 1k of disk space, so you can 
ask your mail client later to compact the mbox file, and then the copying of 
50mb will take place - at a time when you don't care to wait a few seconds 
(eg on the starting up or shutting down of your mail client). It also means 
that until you do compact it, your client will have to read & parse the 
headers of your deleted messages, which takes time if you have a lot of them.

I _think_ the above is true... although it's possible that when I thought I 
was using mbox, I was really using 'mbx', which is an upgraded mbox format. 

I also found this benchmark & comparison: 
http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

- -- 
Dan Armak
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://www.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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