On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Jason Robertson wrote:
> This leads to the ultimate user spool. Using a database for the storage.
Performance?
I wonder why all (well, several :-) of the big ISPs use maildir format
if it's so wasteful? They have millions of users, after all. I think it's
for the performance. No locking problems. (Well, not at the user level.
The file system has to do interlocking things with the directory, of
course.)
Of course, systems get bigger and faster all the time. Performance
issues of today are history tomorrow.
Now, let me see, way back in the 1980s we had a mainframe that had a
"closed box" system for storing mailboxes. Custom-built, not a
generalized database, but it worked very well, ISTR. There are few new
ideas!
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
