imap server performance benchmarks

[Da Rock]

On 03/10/12 08:21, Mark Felder wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:33:53 -0600, Weldon Godfrey 
> <weldon at excelsusphoto.com> wrote:
>
>> I would highly recommend looking at Dovecot.  I have used courier for
>> several ISPs then switched to Dovecot on my last install.  Its 
>> ability for
>> caching the index per user is of great performance advantage if you 
>> choose
>> to leverage an IMAP based webmail solution (like Roundcube, or even
>> Squirrelmail, but I would recommend Roundcube over 
>> Squrrel)...especially if
>> you are going to deal with mailboxes of tens of thousands of messages.
>
> I concur. We use Dovecot at work and even put the indexes on Intel 
> SSDs. My boss's mailbox is actually 1.2 million messages. That's 
> pretty insane.
>
> For my personal email I prefer Archiveopteryx which sanitizes, 
> normalizes, and deduplicates your email. There are caveats (breaks 
> gpg), but I find it to be wicked fast -- faster than Dovecot on my 
> server.
>
> Here's an annoying problem: You have a filesystem with 9 million 
> messages in Maildirs. Backing this up or even rsyncing this sucks. Now 
> imagine being able to use database replication and use database dumps 
> for your backups. Pretty slick. You lose the beautiful power of shell 
> utilities, though....
Yes, thats true. That was tested in the paper: a cyrus? using sql 
database backend performed faster in searches and lookups. But writing 
and deleting was a drag, and you lose the shell; but I'm not sure that 
thats such a problem as one could find tools in the sql commands 
(provided you know databases well enough).

My idea was to run some tests based on extremes, but by the sounds of 
some of these replies I'm a small fry it seems, not as extreme as I 
thought... :)