On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 04:12:15PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote: > Le quintidi 5 floréal, an CCXXIII, Vincent Lefevre a écrit : > > Now I wonder whether the use of the hash by ext3 is a good idea... > > > > Alternatively, I suppose that a SSD disk could improve things. > > Well, filesystems can not be optimized for every use.
Ext3 dates from 2001, and is an incremental update to the ext2 design from 1993. Large-scale storage on flash devices was very uncommon then, and the rise of modern SSDs didn't start until around 2008 iirc. > Having myriads of small files has always been a bad idea anyway, it trashes > the inode and dentries cache, it costs extra disk bandwidth (because you can > not read half a sector at the end of the file) and latency (because of all > the seeks, even when reading in order, it will be more fragmented than a > single file), etc. Of course, nowadays, huge RAM and SSD will mitigate the > issue. Mail storage is a lose-lose situation, really. Maildir improves the performance and reliability of parallel operations on a mailbox versus mbox, but is less space efficient precicely because of the metadata overhead, especially for large mailboxes. One should keep high-read boxes in Mailidir and low-read, large-size archival mailboxes in mbox, potentially compressed. The archivemail tool can assist with moving one to the other. > It is a tragedy that a standard, robust and efficient format for mailboxes > was never designed and adopted. It's a tragedy that many such standards were invented :) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150527095648.gb3...@chew.redmars.org
