[Dovecot] Indexing Performance Question (was tpop3d vs dovecot)

[FiL]

Too bad. I was almost ready to start migrating my mbox-based setup to 
Maildir...
One of the most important reasons for that - to speed things up and 
lower disk IO.
So now I just converted one 3Gb mailbox (88K mails) to Maildir and tried 
accessing it via pop3...

# telnet enders2 110
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK Dovecot ready.
user filonovd
+OK
pass XXXXXX
+OK Logged in.
list                              < here comes looong wait
-ERR Disconnected for inactivity.
Connection closed by foreign host.

There is no index for that Maildir. But dovecot can't even make one in 
the first place. It just times out.
It's really scares me. That means, that for pop3 users Maildir is so 
much slower, than mbox?

Please, somebody tell me this is not true.

FiL

Nate wrote:
> I whole-heartedly agree, that is slow; however, not necessarily any 
> problem with dovecot.  More a filesystem issue.  Because it's not 1 
> large synchronous file, the disk has to seek like crazy to read each 
> file.  Here's some testing to show it's normal:
>
... some test data skipped

> What's sad with these tests is it takes 2m15s to read all the data in 
> 71570 individual files, and only 15s to do it in 1 file.  Granted 
> there's a bit of overhead from the shell script looping, but not 
> *that* much!  I wonder how these tests would go on a different file 
> system.  I'm currently using reiserfs.
>
> - Nate