[Tfug] An Ext4 question...

[Jim March]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Choprboy<choprboy at dakotacom.net> wrote:
> On Sunday 09 August 2009 15:39, Jim March wrote:
>> > How big of mailboxes are you talking about?  (disk size/# of messages)
>>
>> We're talking inbox falling apart at 2gig.  It's a lawyer friend of mine.
>>
>
>
> Being a lawyer (and this would go for any business email box I suppose)... I
> would assume a large number of the emails have attachments, long Re:
> sections, or otherwise exceed 4K each. But I would expect the "falling apart
> at 2G" has to do with the way MBox works, not the individual message size.

YUP.  I know that for sure.

> Since each MBox mail folder is a single file, once you hit 2G the app
> processing the file may have a 32bit memory access problem (i.e the
> programmer used "int" instead of "long int" or "huge int" for their file
> access pointer).

Yes, and apparently independently of the mail client.  The limit is in
the format.

> Personally, I think the reason to go to MDir over MBox is access time. With
> MBox, the entire folder file must be parsed on every access. Unless you have
> a relatively small folder, it will suck up huge amounts of CPU.
>
> My own mailbox is on MDir (years ago I used MBox, but I had to abandon it as
> my folders grew). I currently sit at a roughly a mere ~88,500 email messages,
> my largest folder being about 56,000. I would guess more than half are less
> than 4K in size, with an apparent size of 515M (all the actual file sizes
> added up). True on-disk space used is 670M.
>
> Probably the biggest problem is that my indexes have now grown to 27M on my
> largest folder, the initial opening takes several seconds (though once cached
> it's fast). The next step up would be something like Cyrus, though that is
> server based, not local.
>
>
> Adrian

OK.  So if Maildir is working OK under Ext3/4, cool, what's the best
mail client (GUI type) and what's the best conversion method?

Jim