On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Sergiy Zhuk wrote:
> > Since IDE requires not insignificant CPU overhead, I don't really want to
> > copy a large mailbox (many customers have mailboxes > 30-40 MB) each time
> > they log in.
>
> you're still reading it every time, this is why Berkeley mailbox format
> should be decomissioned.
It's the mailbox format which is the problem. IDE DMA these days is as
low a CPU overhead as scsi, as various linux kernel developers will
cheerfully tell you.
Of course, it's only a good format if you run one drive per IDE bus...
Server RAM helps too. You have to be able to read in the entire mailbox
if you want reasonable startup performance.
AB
