On Sat, Mar 18, 2000 at 02:06:11AM -0800, David E. Weekly wrote:
> my Maildir has 5086 messages in it to be precise. Recently (i.e., in the
> last 500 messages or so) retreiving mail has become *painfully* slow.
> Looking at "top," I find that imapd is choking the CPU, taking 97% of the
> CPU just to open a mail message. Huh?
> Wasn't a Maildir supposed to solve this?
No. Maildir solved other problems which i consider far worse.
Maildir is the way to receive messages ("inbox"), not the way to
store them.
> Or is this a fundamental filesysem problem (I'm using ext2fs)? What
this is an ext2fs problem. Well, ext2 shares it with many other file
systems, but modern filesystems are smarter.
Every access to a file in ext2 has to scan about 50% of the directory -
it's a linear search. (O(n^2))
Regards, Uwe
