Simon Byrnand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I see the same problem from time to time - on a PIII-800. A user > accessing a spool file >50MB causes IO starvation while the copying is > going on and the load average shoots up, making the machine quite > sluggish. If you find a solution I'd be interested to know what it > is....
Same here, same problem: big monolithic mail spool files. I have a solution which uses Maildir/ to get around this. Grafts maildrop into sendmail for local Maildir delivery. Uses qmail's pop3d for mailboxing and POP3 protocol, with authentication by a third-party APOP auth module which just plugs in. Have some code to migrate mailboxes, passwords, blah blah blah. Just haven't put it into production yet :-( Beauty of this is that checking for new mail is just a directory scan. Deleting a message is just an unlink() call. Message attributes are part of the filename, so the message file doesn't need to be rewritten all the time. In fact, messages files are never read or written, except to show their contents to the user.
