depends.
if you use a hashing algorith like postfix does for it's queue structure
...more directories can increase performance by a significant margin.
On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Ken Jones wrote:
> Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2001 11:30:46 -0600
> From: Ken Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Alex Kramarov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Functionality question
>
> Alex Kramarov wrote:
> >
> > I hope this doesn't sound like a vpopmail newbe question, but after some
> > tests I conducted (send 5000 messages to a /etc/passwd user takes 30 minutes
> > on my machine, the same 5000 messages to a virtual user through vpopmail
> > (working with cdb) takes 50 minutes), I am wandering, why does vpopmail uses
> > an executable file for final delivery in qmail-default of the domain,
> > instead of just putting a .qmail-username with the user's maildir to deliver
> > to in domain home directory ? I believe that this could decrease the
> > processing overhead.
> >
> > I understand that this could hert some functionality, like per-domain quotas
> > (if someone need a per-user quota, he can put a quota-limit script in
> > .qmail-username, which would also allow for per-user quotas, which is a
> > needed functionality that seems to be lacking in vpopmail), and also the
> > root domain directory will be cluttered with .qmail files, but this is a
> > small price to pay for such a noticable performance boost.
>
> The main reason vpopmail doesn't use .qmail files is because of sites
> that have more than 1000 users. Once a directory has more than 1,000
> files (or sub directories) the inode lookup time becomes significant.
> Increase that to 12,000 files or even 1 million and you have a
> completely unworkable situation.
>
> If you are looking for performance increases, focusing on and
> improving the efficency of the vdelivermail program would be
> more helpful.
>
> vpopmail does have per user quota limits. Please see the
> --enable-hardquota configuration option.
>
> It would also be interesting to see a graph of delivery performance
> versus number of .qmail files.
>
> Ken Jones
>
