dovecot - May 2007 - frequent index rebuilds versus disabled indexes

Ok, here's the short and sweet version of my dilemma. I have a group of 
servers mounting a shared NFS device to hold mail data for many 
different domains. Is it worth the load balancing management nightmare 
of setting up dedicating smtp, pop, and imap to one server (failing over 
to another in the group if the server goes down) to keep indexes on 
local disk? It's very tempting to just disable indexes and not worry 
about which server a user hits, and considering the vast majority of our 
170,000 accounts only have about a 20MB quota, I'm not sure indexes will 
help that many users. Although, I guess I would need to work out 
something for the few huge accounts we do have.

On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 09:38 -0400, Justin McAleer wrote:
> Ok, here's the short and sweet version of my dilemma. I have a group of
> servers mounting a shared NFS device to hold mail data for many 
> different domains. Is it worth the load balancing management nightmare 
> of setting up dedicating smtp, pop, and imap to one server (failing over 
> to another in the group if the server goes down) to keep indexes on 
> local disk? It's very tempting to just disable indexes and not worry 
> about which server a user hits, and considering the vast majority of our 
> 170,000 accounts only have about a 20MB quota, I'm not sure indexes
will
> help that many users. Although, I guess I would need to work out 
> something for the few huge accounts we do have.
It would be possible to keep indexes in local disks even if the user was
redirected randomly, although it would be less useful then.

But even without indexes I think there could be some problems with
dovecot-uidlist file if multiple servers tried to access the mailbox at
the same time and attribute caching is enabled.

I'll try to get v1.1 to work nicely with NFS and attribute caching, but
for v1.0 I can't really recommend trying it.
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