On Fri, 2010-01-22 at 15:53 -0500, Frank Cusack wrote: > In the future, it would be cool if there were a mailbox format (dbox2?) > where mail headers and each mime part were stored in separate files. > This would enable the zfs dedup feature to be used to maximum benefit.
This is more or less what dbox's single instance storage is going to do. Maybe in half a year or so.. And you don't even need filesystem deduplication feature. :) It would also be possible to already write such Maildir feature. Someone on this list already wrote header/body separation code, which was pretty easy to do with a plugin. > In the zfs filesystem, there is a dedup feature which stores only 1 copy > of duplicate blocks. In a normal mail file, the headers will be > different for each recipient and the chances of the content of the message > being able to be dedup'd are close to zero, because the differences in > header length changes the block boundaries for the rest of the message. > But if each mime part is stored in a separate file, you get massive > compression "for free". Dunno about zfs, but I've heard that at least in one NetApp installation deduplication was way too heavyweight.
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