On Oct 14, 2009, at 7:03 AM, Mikkel wrote:
It has been my wish to move to dbox for a long time hoping to reduce
the number of writes which is really killing us.
Now I wonder what may be the best way of doing so. I'm considering
some sort of intermediate migration where the existing Maildir users
are changed to single-dbox and then later upgraded to 2.0 and
changed to multi-dbox when it becomes stable.
But is this a reasonable task to perform on a production system or
at all? The alternative is to wait for 2.0 to become completely
stable and then go all the way at once.
I'd wait for v2.0 if possible. v1.2's dbox has a couple of problems:
1. antispam plugin doesn't work
2. copying messages can't currently be done by hard linking, so
copying uses more disk I/O (this could be fixed somewhat easily
though, just haven't had time)
3. flags are backed up to individual dbox files "once in a while", but
probably practically pretty often so that also increases disk I/O usage
v2.0 already solved 3 for single+multi-dbox, 2 for multi-dbox and I'm
not sure about 1.
Now the big question is whether multi-dbox and single-dbox are
compatible formats.
Kind of, but not practically.
If a Maildir->dbox migration is made on a system running dovecot v.
1.1, would it then be trivial later changing to multi-dbox after
upgrading to 2.0 or is a completely new migration then needed?
Would this scenario be much different if the system is upgraded to
version 1.2 before the change to single-dbox?
Migrating from single-dbox to multi-dbox isn't any easier than maildir
-> multi-dbox.
I'm trying to get v2.0.0 out pretty quickly though. v2.0.beta1 should
hopefully be out in less than a month. The main problem with it is
actually how to make it enough backwards compatible that everyone
won't start hating me.
