On 4.3.2011, at 23.05, Douglas Mortensen wrote: > I guess to get more specific, some of the questions I have regarding dbox vs. > mdbox are: > > 1. What is the advantage to using multiple files?
mdbox in theory uses less disk I/O for "normal users". > 2. What is the advantage to using a single sdbox file for each user? It's simpler. More difficult to get corrupted. Also if in future there exists a filesystem that supports smaller files better, it's then faster than mdbox. Probably unlikely that it will happen anytime soon. > 3. Is this a binary format, or txt (UTF?)? dbox headers/metadata is ASCII. The message bodies can of course be anything. > 4. Are there real-world benchmarks showing measurable differences between > maildir, sdbox, mdbox? Not that I'm aware of. So far everyone I've tried to ask have replaced their whole mail system and their storage, so the before/after numbers can't be compared. I'm very interested in knowing myself too. > 5. Are sdbox & mdbox equally stable to Maildir? Are they recommended for > production systems? sdbox is so simple that I doubt anyone will find any kind of corruption bugs. mdbox is more complex, but people are using it in production and I haven't heard of any problems recently. Although there have been bugs in how mdbox handles already corrupted files, v2.0.10 had several fixes related to that.
