Hello... I'm setting up dovecot (IMAP only) at an ad-agency (Lots of big files attached to mails). I'm wondering... What would you consider to be reasonable mail quota? My concern is, that some client-software will have problems with huge mailboxes. I was going to give everyone 2GB, but some users demand 15GB+. Does dovecot "prefer" mailboxes within a certain size? Looking forward to hear your thoughts on the subject. Thanks, Tobias Balle-Petersen
> I'm setting up dovecot (IMAP only) at an ad-agency (Lots of big files attached to mails). I'm > wondering... What would you consider to be reasonable mail quota? My concern is, that some > client-software will have problems with huge mailboxes. I was going to give everyone 2GB, but some > users demand 15GB+. Does dovecot "prefer" mailboxes within a certain size?I tend to think that it highly depends on the filesystem/IO scheduler etc, at least with maildir. I'm using maildir on ext3 (with dirhashing) on a Xen instance (so I/O is terribly slow) and the limit up to which I can tolerate the wait seems to be at about 30-40k mails in a single folder irregardless of mail size. You can probably improve on that with XFS (directory listings are cached in memory rather than re-read every time) and by having a dedicated server, which I assume you do. So if you have 30k 10MB emails you're already at almost 300 GiB :) FWIW, my Inbox currently has about 16k mails with 276MiB size, but I'm fairly sure you can fare just as well with larger mails. johannes -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 828 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20080205/e0fb917e/attachment-0002.bin>
On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 10:01 +0100, Tobias Balle-Petersen wrote:> I'm setting up dovecot (IMAP only) at an ad-agency (Lots of big files attached to mails). I'm > wondering... What would you consider to be reasonable mail quota? My concern is, that some > client-software will have problems with huge mailboxes. I was going to give everyone 2GB, but some > users demand 15GB+. Does dovecot "prefer" mailboxes within a certain size?As Johannes said, the mailbox size doesn't really matter to Dovecot, only the number of messages (except for operations such as server-side search). It's also possible to specify a message number quota, but since users can have multiple mailboxes it's less of a problem if users have ten 10k message mailboxes than one 100k message mailbox. Anyway, Dovecot should be able to handle tens of thousands of messages in a single mailbox easily. I've been testing it with a 350k message mailbox once in a while. With ext3 it takes maybe 20 seconds to initially read the directory into cache, and after that for each sync (new message, flag change, expunge, etc) it takes about 2 seconds to sync. v1.1's dbox format doesn't need this syncing and all operations are pretty much instant. I don't know about clients though. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20080205/91d49f10/attachment-0002.bin>