[Dovecot] dbmail benchmarking

Justin McAleer
Mon, 14 May 2007 18:03:38 -0000

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> I thought I'd try benchmarking with dbmail (v2.2.4) to see how much
> slower a SQL backend could actually be. Skip to bottom for the
> conclusions.
>
> Originally I ran the tests with the databases being in XFS filesystem.
> MySQL's performance was horrible. It went 3-7x faster with ext3.
>
>

Timo, what was the hardware you used for this test?

>
>  - In raw append speed dbmail is almost as fast as maildir.
>  - In raw read/write speed maildir is about 1,6 times faster
>  - When adding metadata fetches Dovecot is 4 times faster than dbmail.
> This is most likely because dbmail doesn't have a cache equivalent to
> dovecot.index.cache so it has to do the fetches the slow way.
>
> I would have liked to also run the generic tests with more than 1
> client, but then I start hitting dbmail bugs and the test stops
> (reported already to their bugtracker).