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Re: Advantages/disadvantages of various mbox types



On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 12:16:05PM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 12 at 01:24 PM, quoth Kumar Appaiah:
> >But when I converted my mbox'es to maildirs, the space occupied was 
> >almost 50% more.
> 
> Chances are, most of your email messages are around 2kb in size, right? 
> Problem being: on most filesystems, a file must be made of "blocks", 
> which on most OS's, defaults to 4kb in size. And of course, files can't 
> split up blocks, so every file is, at minimum, 4kb. When you concatenate 
> them together in one file (i.e. mbox) you can put two 2kb messages into 
> a single block.

Actually, afaik most filesystems have a means of allocating less than a
full block, at some performance penalty.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant               decibel@xxxxxxxxxxx 
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

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