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Re: Sendmail problems with large mailboxes
On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Matan Ziv-Av wrote:
AFAIK, imapd copies the mailbox, not sendmail/procmail. Both qpopper and
imapd can be configured to copy the mailbox aside, deal with it, and then
replace it.
1). Handling 200MB of mailbox is utterly stupid, no one should be keeping
a mailbox this size.
2). Running a mail server where performance is an issue on a 5400rpm ide
disk is not a wise choice.
Suggestions:
Check what imapd you are running. Make sure it's a new one. I don't think
this is the problem.
DO NOT KEEP 200MB of mail in your mailbox !!!
If you decide to compile a new imapd, check the performance features it
has. For example, on a mail server where mailbox sizes are not allowed to
bypass 10MB, but we have some 40000 mboxes, we use features like copying
the mailbox to swap (/tmp on solaris) to make things work faster, and save
IO. But you need a alot of memory (512MB->1GB).
--Ariel
>
> > I have encountered a huge drawback of Sendmail (or the default imap daemon
> > of RedHat). I use imap to access the e-mail box of mails that are handled by
> > Sendmail. Since the mailbox is plain text file and not some kind of database
> > it takes a long time to delete or edit messages. For example, for 200MB
> > e-mailbox ittakes 5 minutes to delete a simple message !
> >
> > How is it possible to solve this problem? Will a better imapd implementation
> > will fix the problem? Or is it the end of Sendmail...
>
> To be safe the daemon probably copies the mailbox, and then deletes the
> old, and relinks, so it reads and writes 200MB, so on a more or less
> current IDE 5400 RPM disk, 5 minutes might be reasonable.
> If your users have a large number of messages in their folders, then
> maildir might be a better idea than mailbox. I don't know if there is
> maildir support for sendmail, but there is for qmail.
>
>
> --
> Matan Ziv-Av. matan@svgalib.org
>
>
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--
Ariel Biener
e-mail: ariel@post.tau.ac.il Work phone: 03-6406086
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