Does anyone allow unlimited or extremely large quotas?

[Bron Gondwana]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:38:49AM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 14:12 +0100, Rudy Gevaert wrote: 
> > On 11/16/2010 12:30 PM, Dave McMurtrie wrote:
> > > Good morning,
> > > This may be slightly off-topic, so apologies in advance.  Is there
> > > anyone out there who allows unlimited quota for their users or provides
> > > extremely large quotas when asked for?
> > > If so, can you describe any problems you've had with this?
> > We have users with > 5 GB.
> 
> Our largest quota's a 4GB; without any issues.

Our biggest currently is about 30GB I think.

> I think the issue you will encounter first is clients will start to fall
> down when folders exceed a 'reasonable' number of messages.  Common IMAP
> clients I've seen start to exhibit severe performance issues beyond a
> few hundred thousand messages.

On a 32 bit architecture: we had one folder with over a million messages
which was causing processes to run out of virtual memory trying to map
the cache file in.  This wouldn't be a problem with a 64 bit userland.
 
> > We haven't seen any problems with them.  The only general problem we 
> > face is taking backups of a full store.  It just takes very long to 
> > complete full backups.  (Of course that isn't tied to large or no quota.)

Nup - full backup would be a problem.  We don't do them any more:
everything is context aware backups.

Bron.