On 16/07/02 10:42 +0530, Binand Raj S. wrote: <snip> > Thaths, why do you recommend taking the system down to single user > mode? Isn't stopping the mail subsystem enough? It should be. But you don't want users accessing their mail either.
<snip> > Is it? Consider a mailbox with 10,000 mails. With mbox, when the client > does a STAT command, the POP server needs to open mbox, parse > it, and then send the response. Whereas with maildirs, the server > just needs to run stat() in a loop. Or if a single mail is requested, its > serial no (in the STAT command) is mapped to the filename in Maildir/new, > so a comparatively smaller file needs to be opened and sent across the > network. But there is the overhead of stat(2)ing a lot of files in a single folder. ext2 is bad at this. xfs is much better. > Maybe CRLF translation requirement would make it necessary to open all files > in a Maildir to be opened before their sizes can be determined. > > Also, it seems to me that memory usage etc. of a POP/IMAP server serving > Maildir mailboxes would be lesser compared to one serving mbox mailboxes. For pop, it is much less, imap has a higher usage due to the nautre of the protocol. > I'd like to know what your reasons are in saying both would be equally (?) > slow when dealing with large mailboxes. > > Thinking about it, are there any benchmarks on the relative performance of > these two systems out there? Didn't find any on DJB's home page. stat() on a few thousand files is timeconsuming. > > Cyrus IMAP as well. It has a non-standard format of storing mail that is > > sort of like Maildir. But the problem there would be user's can only read > > mail through the IMAP (i.e you cannot use mutt locally on the machine to > > read off /var/spool/mail or ~/Mail). > > The problem with Cyrus would be one of migration - both to and from. Does > it ship with tools that migrate mbox/Maildir to its database format? Or vice > versa? It does come with scripts, the only information lost is the seen info. Or you could just get users to fetchmail their stuff over into cyrus/courier/whatever. imap server -> fetchmail -> MTA running only on 127.0.0.1 and delivering to your new imap server. Tell users to run a fetchmail script once (down the mail system for a few hours, get all users to migrate (or reset everyones passwords) and then simply let the new imapd run). Devdas Bhagat ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: Jabber - The world's fastest growing real-time communications platform! Don't just IM. Build it in! http://www.jabber.com/osdn/xim _______________________________________________ linux-india-help mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-help
