Tunning for large number of files in INBOX

[Marco Colombo]

On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 14:56 -0600, Michael Loftis wrote:
> 
> --On June 29, 2005 4:30:06 PM -0400 Joel Nimety <jnimety at perimeterusa.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm trying to set up cyrus-imap as a backend for an email archiving
> > solution.  I'm creating one account on the imap server for each customer
> >   domain(s) we'll be archiving mail for.  I'm concerned that the number
> > of emails that will end up in each INBOX will reach some limit (ext3 fs
> > limit, practical limit, etc.)
> 
> With EXT3 there are definite limits, not hard ones, but practical ones for 
> time to traverse/read the inode and list.  Use ReiserFS.  For Mail clients 
> most can't handle big folders because many of them are just POP3/NNTP 
> clients retrofitted to squak IMAP.  Get a real IMAP client like Mulberry 
> that takes advantage of server side sorting, threading, and searching to 
> allow for (nearly) limitless mailboxes but not download each and every 
> header.
> 
> With ReiserFS and UFS+Hashdirs (Linux and FreeBSD respectively) I 
> personally have many mailboxes that are well over 20k or 30k messages, and 
> have a few in the 200k range, haven't run into any performance problems. 
> With EXT3 I had serious problems in the 5k range, or less.

When was that?

AFAIK, EXT3 on Linux has indexed directory access since version 2.5.42
(11 Oct 2002). Any 2.6 kernel and any 2.4.20+ kernel includes it. You
should see no problem in handling directories with > 100k files (biggest
IMAP folder I've seen so far was about 50k messages).

.TM.
-- 
      ____/  ____/   /
     /      /       /                   Marco Colombo
    ___/  ___  /   /                  Technical Manager
   /          /   /                      ESI s.r.l.
 _____/ _____/  _/                      Colombo at ESI.it

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