Derek D. Martin wrote: > > But how does it compare to mbox on the same FS? I'll bet it's still > significantly slower.
but with mbox, the entire file has to be stated every time the file is read or modified. with a large file, this can be pretty resource intensive, and can also be time consuming. this is a big problem with POP3 - and this is a big advantage for machines where most users are connecting remotely. Maildir keeps the load lower, and in many cases is faster to boot. your assumption may also be faulty because the problem ext2 has is with opening all those little files; so it doesn't necessarily follow that mbox will also be faster on other filesystems. in other words, Maildir is (i'm pretty sure) inherently faster, but is limited by file system performance. there was an article somewhere (i don't have the link) on this (specifically on the fact that ext2 and Maildir could be slow); i'll see if i can dig up the link. i'm excited to check out me's header caching patch - i didn't realize there was a patch available - so thanks for letting us know! w
