Re: Mailbox Hashing

["Dan" <dan@docisp.com>]

How can hashing be implemented for /var/spool/mail/* files? Users we'll be popping
their mail as well as acessing with web-client.

>On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 03:12:03PM +0000, Dan wrote:
>> How would Zmailer's performance be effected if it hashed mailboxes, or stored

>> them in Maildir format? How do large mail spool files affect Zmailer? Or
those
>> problems are alieviated with the help of router? What would be the maximum
number
>> of users supported by FS without mail spool hashing. These are very interesting

>> questions. Any ideas? Thanks.
>> 
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>
>I think that question pertains to zmailer's local mail transport program, sm.

>It also depends a lot on the underlying OS and the filesystem. I know
>SGI's XFS hashes the directories anyway so you don't get a slowdown
>in a flat structure. I run Linux and ext2 so it was necessary to hash.
>
>I always used procmail in the place of sendmail as our users have .procmailrc

>files so I don't know the reason for that, but I do know that around 
>8 thousand users mounted through NFS it gets painfully slow. We switched
>to two-level hashing and now we're at 25 thousand users and it still rocks.

>my next project is building an even bigger mailfarm that can scale up
>to a million users, most likely using three levels of hashing.
>
>Imre
>
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