Todd A. Jacobs wrote: > This is a silly response. Maildir and mbox have different efficiencies; > it depends on what you're optimizing for. Maildir requires no locking, > and is more efficient for indivdual deletes;
It is not a silly response, it is factual. 500Mb of mail at an average of
5Kb per message is 100,000 messages. 100,000 files in a single directory is
not "more efficient for individual deletes" when you're a mail administrator
trying to reduce the mail load so the customer's machine won't time out while
connecting to the server to retrieve mail. You can't even do simple file
operations to know which files to delete without the machine taking several
minutes. Any file globbing is out of the question since it will more than
likely exceed the maximum number of arguments and filename completion again
causes excessive pauses. In short every operation for manipulation the
messages is just shot to hell.
A comparable mbox, on the other hand, you can at least do all of the above
without having a book handy. The only operation which takes quite a while
would be opening up the file in a text editor. Of course that operation is
faster than anything requiring traversing the directory and once open
operations are far faster.
Maildir is good on paper. In practice and in contact with customers
maildir falls flat on its face. In the years of admining mbox at an ISP with
7,000 customers I never had corruption issues and mail problems like the above
were resolved in a few minutes. My last job at a smaller hosting company with
only hundreds of customers I routinely had to fix maildir's problems and spend
an ungodly amount of time (30-40m) per problem because I had to work around
not being able to file glob, do a simple directory listing, etc. I don't
consider that "silly" in the lest and given the inclination of us unix geeks
to keep thousands of messages lying around for years on end it is certainly a
concern that should be passed on to any potential person thinking of maildir.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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