Phillip Macey wrote: > On 14/05/2009 5:11 PM, Steffen Kaiser wrote: >> On Wed, 13 May 2009, Richard Hobbs wrote: >>> The main complaint we have from users is that their IMAP Inbox, with >>> 5000 emails in it takes ages to appear, and no amount of coaxing will >>> convince them to split their inbox into multiple folders. >> >> Oh, we serve Maildir via Dovecot IMAP and 5000 messages per folder are >> a wimp. Problems start if the user: > We are having some performancec issues on our server at the moment - all > I can put it down to is the large size of some maildirs. Eg. `ls -ld > Maildir/cur` might show a directory >20Mb in size for some of our users > (20-30k emails). > (Performance issues == everything is running ok then all of a sudden > load avg goes through the roof, system cpu time goes crazy. Reading mail > grinds to a halt. Then everything recovers just as suddenly and the load > avg gradually returns to normal levels)
Are you using ext3 by chance? Vanilla ext3 without directory indexing (or whatever it's called) *hates* directories with a lot of files - like maildir. Personally, I use XFS, which doesn't suffer from this problem since it uses b-trees instead of a table(!) like ext3 does. ~Seth