Ondrej Sur� <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Fri, 14 Jan 2000:
> From libc-client4.7 documentation:
> --strip--
> The Maildir format used by qmail has all of the performance
> disadvantages of mh noted above, with the additional problem
<snip>
> Could someone comment this?
Well, I can say something from a user's perspective.
About scaling...
I just tried opening a Maildir folder with close to 8000 messages in
it (using Mutt, my preferred client). The folder is in my home dir,
which is NFS-mounted over 100Mbit ethernet. It took over a minute,
but not quite 2 minutes (although this is just a guess, I didn't time).
Considering the number of messages, it didn't seem like too outrageous
a waiting time. mbox format would be faster (depending on message size
of course), but I'm not sure how much. I'd estimate probably not more
than 50%, perhaps less, based on my handling of mbox folders which have
over 10000 messages in them.
I have experienced somewhat lengthy "freezes" while Mutt re-scans the
Maildir if there are a lot of messages in there.
But, the commentary completely misses the good points and the purpose
of Maildirs: that they're ideal for incoming mail delivery, especially
when the folder is accesses over NFS (whether "access" delivery or
reading or both). Maildir format is not something you should be using
for email archival, or for very large mail folders. However, the lack
of locking requirement is a big win over NFS.
I can see that there might be a problem with shared folder access if the
filenames change, however I don't see how the situation is any better
with other folder formats that require locking and then possibly
re-reading of the entire folder if one message changes. Shared access
is tricky, no matter what kind of folder format you have. Also, I'm not
sure whether the filenames are supposed to change (are they?), because
an email client needs to read in the headers from each message anyway
in order to display them, so status information could also be kept
there as with the mbox format.
In the end, I've been using Maildirs happily for (over?) a year now,
and they work very well in practice. I use mbox format for email
archival, Maildir for incoming folders. I haven't noticed any of the
problems at all that they talk of, with moderate size (1000 messages
or less) folders. And Mutt as the MUA seems to handle them just fine.
Mikko
--
// Mikko H�nninen, aka. Wizzu // [EMAIL PROTECTED] // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
Beware of low-flying butterflies.
