Uwe,
Okay. Fair enough. So I have a very, very trivial question for the list.
(BTW, ext2fs gave me a kernel Oops this morning: something I haven't seen
for 4.5 years!) I think that it is an appropriate one.
I have a Linux server with a good amount of storage, a decent amount of
RAM, a fast processor, and a blazing fast network connection.
I want to use it as my mail server (for JUST ME!) and be able to check my
email efficiently from multiple locations. I happen to have a lot of mail
(>5000 messages, ~200/day), so I'd also like to be able to filter my
messages.
The answer so far has been to use qmail w/IMAP patched for Maildir. But now
that it seems that my underlying filesystem is unhappy enough about this
idea to crash my kernel, it's not seeming like such a hot notion.
Previously, I had used qmail with an mbox file. This worked until my mbox
grew to about 50Mb, at which point my system choked, since every five
minutes when my client would duck in to see if it had any mail, the entire
mbox file would be loaded in from disk, parsed, and stored in memory,
causing my disk to thrash not only due to constantly reading in such big
files, but also from the paging generated from having a 50Mb process in
memory.
I have not found a trivial way to use filtering with the two above
scenarios. (A pointer to a FAQ and/or an answer would be great: I'm more
than happy to RTFM when I know where the FM is.)
So right now, as a single user on a powerful system, I have no good way to
handle email. This seems pretty pathetic. Anyone care to lend (well, okay,
give) a few words of advice?
-david
----- Original Message -----
From: Uwe Ohse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: David E. Weekly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2000 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: Maildir Scalability Question
> 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
>
