[CentOS] mbox files - can they be "compacted"?
Lamar Owen
lowen at pari.edu
Tue Apr 15 18:24:47 UTC 2014
On 04/14/2014 01:41 AM, Russell Miller wrote:
> HOWEVER. When a directory grows too large, the OS can take a long time
> to seek through the directory, which can cause its own set of
> problems. And this makes cleaning out a maildir directory selectively
> a real pain. Maildir really could do with a hashing mechanism.
Worse, if the dir gets too big, even after files are deleted it can be
very slow. I had one case with >1,000,000 messages in a single maildir
(spam on steroids, was getting 80,000 messages per hour overnight);
after it was cleaned out to <1,000 messages it still took several
minutes to ls the dir, and the machine's responsiveness went through the
floor. Copying to a new dir and renaming fixed the slowdown; the
directory was >50MB (the directory itself, not its contents).
I'd rather have mbox for plain text e-mail storage, and a database for
something really high performance.
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