on Sat Oct 27 2012, Stan Hoeppner <stan-AT-hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
> On 10/27/2012 3:00 PM, David Abrahams wrote: >> >> I noticed that occasionally searching in my huge archive mailbox can be >> really slow, so I tried doveadm index on it and it seemed to do a lot of >> work, which seemed strange given, for example, that dovecot-lda says it >> keeps Dovecot index files up-to-date. Then I thought, "maybe these are >> different files than the search indices." If so, that's not entirely >> clear from the docs and Wiki. So, questions: > > Mailbox and search indexes are separate. If so, I hereby request that they be properly and explicitly distinguished from one another, every place "index" is mentioned on the wiki. > Look in your mailbox directory and you'll see them, such as on 1.2.x > with mbox: I'm on 2.x with mdbox, FWIW. > $ la /home/stan/mail/.imap/1-Dovecot > total 3.4M > drwx------ 2 stan stan 135 Oct 25 21:39 . > drwx------ 51 stan stan 4.0K Apr 13 2012 .. > -rw------- 1 stan stan 44K Oct 27 13:28 dovecot.index > -rw------- 1 stan stan 1.2M Oct 27 21:23 dovecot.index.cache > -rw------- 1 stan stan 18K Oct 27 21:23 dovecot.index.log > -rw------- 1 stan stan 1.1M May 20 06:32 dovecot.index.search > -rw------- 1 stan stan 1.1M May 20 06:32 dovecot.index.search.uids > > I've not full text searched this folder for quite some time, thus the > search indexes are not current, and the next FTS of this mail folder > will take much more time than if the FTS indexes were current. > >> * When are search indexes updated? > > When the index is stale. That's pretty vague :-) >> * Are they updated incrementally? >> * If not, why not? >> * If so, why would a mailbox's index drift out-of-date, as mine had? > > When a sufficient number of messages are added to an IMAP folder the FTS > index becomes stale. That's a little less vague, thanks :-) > This index is not updated in real time. This is why Timo and others > recommend cron'ing a script to index folders regularly that are > searched regularly. And how does one index the folders for search? Is that "doveadm index" or "doveadm fts rescan" (which I see at http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS but NOT in the manpage), or...? > This keeps the indexes up to date and keeps searches fast. If you > don't do this or search often, your indexes become stale. Then each > time you do an FTS search the first thing that happens is an FTS > re-indexing of the mail folder. Only then does it display the search > results. > >> BTW, I'm using the clucene search backend. > > I've not used Lucene, but I believe the default behavior is similar to > the Dovecot 1.2.x FTS indexer. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that, thanks. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing Software Development Training http://www.boostpro.com Clang/LLVM/EDG Compilers C++ Boost
