on 12/5/2007 3:48 PM Kenneth Porter spake the following:
--On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:57 PM -0700 Craig White craigwhite@azapple.com wrote:
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
Each e-mail is stored as a separate file, not a nasty single mbox file that gets large.
Note that the competitors can use maildir, so this isn't a Cyrus-only feature.
But AFAIK this comes at a storage penalty: Many small files will waste space approximately equal to half the storage allocation unit times the number of files. Or is there a way to mitigate this on ext3? (I don't want to go to Reiser.)
You can format a filesystem with whatever block sizes you want. 1k blocks will waste less space then 4k blocks, but will add overhead on larger filesystems. But any filesystem would suffer this to some extent. Some more than others since their minimum and maximum block sizes are different.. A database would probably be the most space efficient, but harder to set up since it is less used.