I just had to write this even while it's not just yet in CVS, but it's
only a few fixes away from being committed..
My year long dream has finally came true :)
[Summary: Next release will have REALLY kickass indexes]
Previously the biggest problem with caching message data in indexes was
that we had to do it while syncing the mailbox, before client even saw
those messages. This caused index rebuilds to be very slow since it had
to go through all mails and cache all of them, even if client never
would access them. Alternative was to not cache anything at all, but
that wasn't really good idea either.
Now Dovecot caches the data when client is actually requesting it. That
way it will never do any extra work for caching something that client
isn't currently interested in. There's still the anticipatory caching
for data that client is likely to be interested in later, but that is
done only when it doesn't cause extra disk I/O.
The reason why it took this long was because it was previously too
difficult with read/write locking that indexes required. I couldn't have
relied on it working since changing from read lock -> write lock could
deadlock and dropping the lock in the middle would have caused even more
problems.
So, what I did was to rewrite the cache file handling completely:
- It doesn't require any locking to read from it.
- It will be NFS-safe without being too costly.
- The file format itself is now architecture-independent.
- Uses less space than before
- OpenBSD support is now worse than before, even worse than
NFS-support. They should get that unified cache done.
Cached data is also selected better:
- Specifically requested message headers are cached (FETCH, SEARCH,
SORT, THREAD, etc.)
- IMAP ENVELOPE isn't treated in any special way anymore. It's treated
just as if you had requested HEADER.FIELDS (Date Subject From ...etc.).
- Maildir filenames aren't constantly updated in the cache file
anymore. This takes more memory now, but should reduce disk I/O.
There's a few more tweaks that I'll probably add later:
- Maildir: When compressing cache file we update mail's filename to
current one so if message's flags aren't changed often, it won't use
any
extra memory either.
- A normal text/plain message doesn't need to have it's IMAP
BODYSTRUCTURE cached. It only needs a single bit set in flags. Should
reduce used space quite a lot.
- Message with only one body part doesn't need to have it's body
structure stored at all since it's mostly just useful for fetching body
parts. Plus the body structure could be generated if message sizes were
known.
All this work was only for index cache file (ex. .data file). There's
still the main .imap.index file and modify log files.
Modify log should be easy to make NFS-safe - I'm currently using some
stupid file locking to figure out when the file is safe to overwrite,
but I should have simply replaced the old file with rename(). That will
solve some other problems as well as make the code simpler. It should be
possible to be made read-lockless as well.
The main index file is more problematic though. It contains a lot of
changing fields in the header, such as number of messages, number of
seen messages, etc. I can't think of any way to make it safe to read
these fields without locks (my previous ideas didn't actually work).
Lockless reads are pretty much a must for scalable NFS-safety. I think
it could be done by simply removing all the constantly changing headers.
If you want to know how many seen messages there are, just read all the
records in the file and count them. Expunging would be done by rewriting
the file and rename()ing it over the old file. Appending new messages is
a bit tricky to do safely, but I think I know how to do that too..
read/write locks allow the changing headers, but there's locking
contention problems with shared mailboxes..
I think I'll make it optional how to do this.
Oh, and I also thought how indexes would work with shared mailboxes. You
could use one shared cache file, but each user would have their own main
index and modify log. That would allow storing per-user flags in the
index file and also expunge (hide) messages by removing them from user's
index.
