On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, David Harris wrote:
> I've been talking to Mark Crispin about the Maildir format and he as brought
> up what really seems to be a valid concern to me.
>
> He says that Maildir is unsuitable for large servers because the filesytems
> serialize creation and deletion of files in a single file system, because
> the inode and free block tables have to be manipulated. Thus the file
> creation part of Maildir drivery ends up being serialized and you spend all
> your time in the filesystem. He states problems with servers processing more
> than a few hundred messages per second (300+ or so).
This is might be a bottlneck true if one were using the unix file system.
At work we use Solaris' disksuite to make the file system 'logging' this
boosts the performance of the system considerably.
When XFS is availabale for linux there will be a considerably improved
filestystem available there.
RjL
