performance hints (6.2)

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Aug 18, 2007, at 10:41 AM, Rob wrote:

> What mailfile format are you using - mbox / mdir?  And while it  
> might be a major change, consider dumping UW and using Dovecot  
> http://dovecot.org/   UW's performance, scalability, and security  
> have been less than great for many years.

UW's performance and scalability is just fine if you use their  
*recommended* mailbox format, mbx.  It's only if you use mbox (unix)  
which is provided for transition and backwards compatibility that you  
experience performance and scalability problems.

I have no problem with mailboxes with more than 20K messages in mbx  
format using UW-IMAP.

In my experience, all of the performance complaints about UW-IMAP  
have to do with people using legacy mailbox formats.  UW appears to  
be the only IMAP server which provides support for such legacy  
formats, so that is probably why it takes so much blame for the  
performance problems of such mailboxes.

See

   http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/formats.txt.html

for Mark Crispin's rant about mailbox formats to help understand the  
choices made in UW-IMAP.

There may be plenty of good reasons to prefer dovecote or cyrus or  
zimbra over UW-IMAP, but on this performance and scalability issue,  
UW-IMAP has had an unfair rap.

-j

-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/