[Mailman-Developers] Incoming Queue format

[emf]

Brad Knowles wrote:
> Among other things Maildir creates really hairy long filenames, which 
> can easily blow the iname/inode caching built into most filesystems 

I can't find a filesystem that has a filename dependency for inode 
caching, so I suspect I'm completely misunderstanding this. Could you 
expand on that a bit?

> -- you could get the same benefit by using a better filename 
> naming/hashing scheme with fewer characters.  It also does a lot of 
> excessive synchronous meta-data operations (e.g., creating files, 
> renaming files, etc...), and that can place a heavy load on the 
> underlying filesystem.

Maybe; but there are at least two filesystems (XFS, reiserfs) and likely 
more that handle file renaming/creating really cheaply, and have their 
own ninja ways of dealing with really large directories that are the 
product of a rather large amount of coding hours.

Maildir has the advantage of being bog standard and readily 
comprehended. While I'm all in favor of some lmtp delivery mechanism, I 
don't see why we should continue inventing our own queue-on-disk 
approach merely to cater to poorly designed filesystems.

It seems to me like anyone likely to end up with a huge enough incoming 
mailman queue to care about Maildir's inefficiencies would also be able 
to put a sensible filesystem underneath it.

~ethan fremen