On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 03:53:24PM +1200, John Morton wrote: > > Maildir performance and scalability is dependant on the filesystem. If the > filesystem your maildirs live on store small files efficiently, and can list > and access files in directories filled with thousands of other small files, > no problem (ie Reiserfs), but if not (ie ext2/3), performance will tend to > suck.
ext3 is extremely fast with directories with thousands of files in them. ext3: $ time ls -al ~/mail/folders/systems/cur/ | wc -l 5602 real 0m0.297s user 0m0.240s sys 0m0.050s reiserfs: $ time ls -al ~/mail/folders/systems/cur/ | wc -l 5584 real 0m31.667s user 0m0.810s sys 0m1.020s Both are 2.4.18 woody systems, the first a PIII 600, the second a dual PPro 200, both ultra wide scsi 7200rpm disks. > It's a big ask to have people switch there partitions from one fs to another > to get good mail access (especially when mbox and a client implemented index > will mitigate the problem), but I believe there are patches for ext2/3 that > address the 1000's of files problem that may go into 2.5, so perhaps by the > next debian release, this won't be a problem. I believe the patch to ext3 went in to 2.4 a while back. > I agree that hacking mail/news software of all kinds to pick there mailbox > format based on /etc/defaults/mailbox_format would be remarkably useful. I can't stand reading my mail on anything other than ext3/maildir ever since I saw on the mutt mailing list how fast ext3 is on large dirs. I run my own mail server at work for this reason. maildir is reliable and ext3 is fast and reliable - I refuse any other combo ;) -- The Internet used to be a lot of smart people sitting at dumb terminals, but now its a lot of dumb people sitting at smart terminals!
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