Re: Advantages/disadvantages of various mbox types
On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 10:04:43AM +0200, Hendrik Mangels wrote:
> Kumar Appaiah (2005-07-12, 13:24):
> > Are there any advantages of using maildir over mbox? I understand
> > that maildir folders need not be locked when procmail etc. write
> > into it, since file names don't clash, and that is an advantage.
> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?MuttFaq/Maildir
> http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html
> http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/
Of course, two of these are pretty biased sources. If you're delivering
mail to a folder mounted over NFS, Maildir is probably a somewhat better
choice (though the problems with mbox / NFS have been exaggerated). Some
of the difference in performance has to do with the OS and filesystem
you're using.
There are some nice things about Maildir; mbox works fine for me on
machines I run for myself; we use mbox at $workplace with no problem. At
my previous job, I helped put together a large system which used
Maildir - in that case, we chose Maildir partly because file locking w/
NFS is so flakey (esp. with Linux clients), so we wanted a solution
which would deal gracefully with situations where locking didn't work
properly.
In terms of performance, I think it really depends on the type of mail
you're getting, what type of operations you're doing on it most, and OS
/ hardware / filesystem / etc. If you do use Maildir, the Maildir
header-caching patch and the dev version of mutt will improve
performance.
If you don't need to access archive folders via IMAP, you could consider
a mix of Maildir and mbox... (e.g., Maildir for incoming folders, mbox
for archives).
> > when I converted my mbox'es to maildirs, the space occupied was
> > almost 50% more.
What OS? What filesystem? What block size?
--
)) <> ((
forever.