Edward Flick wrote:
Just out of curiosity, is there anything wrong with just using the
filesystem? Folders work wonders :-P. And sets of enumerated files for
messages would be nice, easy, and quick to implement, and I guess some quick
and easy link file for common boxes between accounts. What do you think?
Of course this is before really looking through much code. But I like to
get started on the right foot.
I have University of Washington IMAP on my Linux machine and use an experimental format mx which is as you describe. To quote the docs:
. mx This is an experimental format, and may be removed in a future release. ...
[snip]
mx is somewhat inefficient; the entire directory must be read
and each file stat()'d. We found it intolerable for a
moderate sized mailbox (2000 messages) and have more or less
abandoned it.
[snip]
There's a general reason why file/message formats are a bad idea. Just about every filesystem in existance serializes file creation and deletions because these manipulate the free space map. This turns out to be an enormous problem when you start creating/deleting more than a few messages per second; you spend all your time thrashing in the filesystem.
It is also extremely slow to do a text search through a file/message format mailbox. All of those open()s and close()s really add up to major filesystem thrashing.
I was not completely convinced by this. File system devices are getting faster for a start.
Jim Wright
-- Recently completed - Child Brain Injury Trust Admin System http://cbitdemo.paneris.org/
Urgently seeking paid work Java, Linux, XML and much more. http://be.webz.cz/
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