Once upon a time, Eric Broch <ebr...@whitehorsetc.com> said: > that courier chokes on large mailboxes, but I never experienced that. It > always performed well for me.
I recently switched an install of about 55,000 mailboxes (mostly telco/ISP customers) from Courier to Dovecot. The mail spool is on a backend accessed over NFS; the NFS network traffic dropped significantly (from around 300 megabits per second to about 20 megabits per second) after the switch. Our backend has an SSD read cache to (mostly) keep up with the load with Courier, and now with Dovecot, the SSD is essentially unused (the working set fits in the storage array RAM cache). Depending on your access patterns, Dovecot indexing can be a huge win. Also, Dovecot management is far superior. For example, we have mailbox quotas, which with Courier were just stored in a file in the Maildir. That file had to be regenerated periodically (scanning the whole mailbox), and there was no quick way to check the quota status (it took reading 55,000 files). Dovecot can store quotas in a database, so checking them now is one SELECT (that takes a fraction of a second) away. -- Chris Adams <c...@cmadams.net>
