From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v734) In-Reply-To: References: <7552e285cac28e40596d8d18ddb660ce@collyer.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Lyndon Nerenberg Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 20:06:37 -0800 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: [9fans] Scaleable mail repositories. Topicbox-Message-UUID: a3049350-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Oct 29, 2005, at 6:18 PM, Paul Lalonde wrote: > I used to keep all my mail this way using MH; it worked well up to > the point where directories got so full that directory operations > were taking too long (I remember a nasty n^2 sort in the early days > of linux). If Plan9's file handling is up to it, I'm in favour of > this approach. Just remember that it has to work well with 10's of > thousands of emails in a directory - search is making organization > obsolete. Heck, some of us didn't manage organization before > search made it obsolete. The trick to making this work well is to do what the Cyrus IMAP server does: use the MH style one-message-per-file layout, and keep an index cache of the commonly accessed items (from, to, date, mime structure). It's fast, and it scales very well. When I was at Messaging Direct we sold a commercial version of the Cyrus server. We later designed our own IMAP server, but we kept the Cyrus file and cache layout as it was still the fastest and most scalable solution to the problem. --lyndon