Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue) [LWN.net]

Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

Posted Oct 5, 2009 23:29 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue) by vivo
Parent article: Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

12K messages is a fair number. it's enough to cause grief for mail clients that don't really use IMAP (i.e. they use IMAP as POP3 to fetch messages and then do everything locally), but it's not enough to cause problems if you have an IMAP server that uses ext2/3 and stores all the messages as seperate files (other filesystems handle this much better)

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Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

Posted Oct 6, 2009 0:35 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

ext3/4 have no problems with that sort of thing either if you turn on
dir_index to use hashed directories.

I used to use reiserfs for my nnml spools and news tradspool. I've
switched to ext4. The disk saving from tail packing is insignificant these
days (I can't read enough mail to fill a modern disk in my lifetime) and
all the nasty O(n) stuff is eliminated by dir_index.

Stresstesting IMAP clients (Hackvalue)

Posted Oct 6, 2009 0:58 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I haven't tried ext4 yet (it's design changes give it a good chance of performing well), but my testing with ext3 and dir_index have not given nearly the performance that I can get from XFS