Troy Morrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>We have a fairly ongoing problem with some of the users at work who don't
>seem capable of cleaning out their INBOX, so they end up with 100MB mail
>spools with 7000 messages in them.
>
>I had theorized that chunking over the 100MB mailbox was slow, and that
>using a maildir would be much faster, and it is except that with that many
>messages, the OS slows down.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions (including a different filesystem -- we
>just used ext2) that might help this?
A hashing filesystem, such as SGI's XFS (which is coming to Linux),
makes large directories much more manageable. But even with zero
filesystem overhead, most MUA's will only handle mailboxes so big with
acceptable performance: they have to open each message file and
extract various header information. A clever MUA could maintain that
information separately, but none that I'm aware of actually do.
-Dave
