Subject: Re: cheap RAID?
To: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
From: Chris Jones <cjones@rupert.honors.montana.edu>
List: current-users
Date: 06/09/1999 14:18:34
>>>>> "JS" == Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU> writes:

>> If you're using imap-uw, this is because the IMAP server from UW is
>> horribly inefficient with large mailboxes.  Even for a mailbox
>> listing, it creates temporary storage for all that scanning, and
>> can even copy the entire mailbox to /tmp and back again for some
>> IMAP commands.
>> 
>> It also has a problem with memory chewing.  It reads in a whole lot
>> of data for `caching' ... but that end up making the processes 30MB
>> or more in size for very large mailboxes.

JS> How does cyrus compare?

The last time I tried cyrus, it hooked into sendmail in place of
mail.local, and it stored email in the spool in a completely different
format than everything else in unix expects.  So, if *all* of your
users intend to use IMAP clients to read mail, and if you never want
to convert from cyrus to something else, and if you never need to read
mail when cyrus isn't running, then it's pretty neat.  But my
situation didn't match all of those qualifiers, so I went with the
(admittedly slow and annoying) UW version.

Somebody should really write a good IMAP server.  I was going to,
once, but I didn't find the motivation to get very far with it.

Chris

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------cjones@math.montana.edu
Chris Jones                                          cjones@honors.montana.edu
           Mad scientist at large                    cjones@nervana.montana.edu
"Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"