On Thu, 2011-09-08 at 14:47 -0400, Anton Aylward wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams said the following on 09/08/2011 02:06 PM:
On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 02:12 -0700, Linda Walsh wrote: [...]
I went from UoW IMAP to dovecot -- unlike Cyrus, it didn't require I reformat my email boxes (all in unix 'mbox format', as they all started as Unix-mbox's)... into it's custom format. And Dovecot is very fast.... mbox is fast? I don't believe that for a second. I doubt Dovecot uses mbox; it probably converted the mail to maildir or UoW was already using maildir. mbox is a broken and obsolete mailbox format; and very slow. How do you get to that conclusion?
Long experience and an understanding of how mbox works.
On the one hand dealing with a mbox involves opening two files: index and data. Using index, seek.
Incorrect; if there is an index it is *not* mbox. It is some extension to mbox; mbox does not specify, describe, or require an index.
On the other maildir requires a dirread, the opening a file and a read. If its just the one message, then its probably about the same. I you are reading though a logical mail folder reading each message in turn then compare the overhead of file open to the overhead on a seek on an already open file. Maybe that file is cached so there is no syscall. If I were writing a mail user agent entirely in shell, I'd pick maildir. Dovecot uses mbox. I have over 200 such mboxes in my mail 'catalogue' and there is a dovecot.index.log, dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache for each. I doubt very much that mbox format under Dovecot is slow.
Okay. But then it isn't using mbox; it has extended mbox [maybe we can call it mbox+]. If you modify the mbox directly the indexes will be out-of-date. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org