On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 12:51:06PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Saturday 05 April 2003 12:05, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 11:51:47AM +0300, Shaul Karl wrote: > > > On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 11:15:42PM +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > > > > > > > > mbox is more > > > > common (is the "standard"), maildir is newer (and probably better). > > > > > > Can you tell in what ways maildir is probably better then mbox?
mbox is more widely supported. Though maildir is has also a large A support base, including procmail and most (all?) common mailers. > > > > It keeps each message in a file, so it's hopefully faster. Deleting > > a 1K message from the middle of a 100MB folder does not cause copying > > of 50MB. I never used it myself (yet?), though, so I do not know what > > difference it has in performance in practice. mbox has two major problems: * All the data is in one file (locking problems) * there is no index to that file. Thus operations are highly inefficient. > > I could be wrong, but I always thought that deleting a 1k msg from the middle > of a 100mb mbox file doesn't cause any copying right away. It just marks the > msg as deleted by changing a byte or two in its header, and so doesn't show > it to you anymore. There is no index to mark it in. Or do you intend to write on the place of the message? Anyway, the format has no specifications regarding "deleted" messages. > > However that also means you haven't freed up that 1k of disk space, so you can > ask your mail client later to compact the mbox file, and then the copying of > 50mb will take place - at a time when you don't care to wait a few seconds > (eg on the starting up or shutting down of your mail client). It also means > that until you do compact it, your client will have to read & parse the > headers of your deleted messages, which takes time if you have a lot of them. > > I _think_ the above is true... although it's possible that when I thought I > was using mbox, I was really using 'mbx', which is an upgraded mbox format. > > I also found this benchmark & comparison: > http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/ Note that this is not exactly a mbox-vs-maildir benchmark, but a wu vs. courier benchmark. The more interesting results are those in the link to the later benchmark, that also compares mbx , and also compares ext3 vs. reiserfs. mbx is wu's attempt to create a more efficient mailbox format. Although they are now working on an improved one. Anyway, like the mbx benchmark remarked, there is very poor software support for mbx. Virtually only uw-imap, pine, and uw-imap-tools. -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
