[Gllug] [OT] Largest mailbox EVER!

[Richard Jones]

Back in the days when I worked for a small web-mail supplier, before
we fixed all the bugs in the quota system, we had some mailboxes which
would accumulate multiple millions of messages (mainly spam). This was
in maildir format, so you had a directory with millions of files in
it.

ext2 behaves *really* pessimally when you have a directory with
millions of files in it. Any process that touches the directory starts
consuming massive amounts of CPU in system state. The NFS daemon in
particular. You have a limited number of NFS daemons, and as each one
got "stuck" on one of the huge directories in question, it stopped
servicing other users. Gradually things ground to a halt.

In the end I had to write a script which read the unsorted directory
entry and deleted the files in unsorted order, in groups of 10,000.

Not nice. Though to be fair, Linux didn't crash ...

But I agree, 15 GB for a mailbox must be some sort of record. Perhaps
a record in foolishness, but a record nevertheless.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
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