On Feb 25, 2010, at 2:17 PM, Terry Barnum wrote:

I have postfix/dovecot/mysql installed using MacPorts on a quad-core 2.8GHz MacPro running Snow Leopard (10.6.2). I moved the base mail directory to a pair of 10k RPM Raptors that are mirrored (/Volumes/ email/) and everything seems to be working fine on an unused domain with very little traffic. I used imapsync to pull everything from the current mailserver to this test server to play with.

Our current mailserver's IMAP performance *really* suffers when an IMAP folder exceeds ~500MB or ~5k messages. I've become very tired of being the mailbox police trying to get my 20 users to delete email or divide into smaller mailboxes.

Are there folks on the list running postfix/dovecot on similar Mac hardware that can share their experiences? Specifically, are there any limitations (file descriptors, other?) that can impact performance I should be aware of? How does dovecot on the Mac deal with >500GB maildirs?

Is there a recommended tool for loading and testing the server? Postal?

I have 20 IMAP users, with a total of ~37GB of mail currently.

Thanks for any help and insight.


Mac OS X 10.5.8
dovecot 1.2.9
Two mirrored 7200rpm sata drives.
dbox mailbox format

My Inbox is 3.5G on disk and I'm happy with my performance.
Mail.app took 8 sec. to search my Inbox for "postfix" but caches mail.
Telnet imap login took 55 sec. for 'search text "postfix"'.
New mail notifications in Mail.app are near instant. I know your old box fails here.


// Brad

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