1999-10-14-16:35:59 George Kahler:
Q: Will mbx buy me performance on the toaster ? Q: Is Maildir a better choice ?
I don't know mbx specifically, but as far as I know it doesn't share Maildir's unique strength for this application (at least, I've never heard people cite mbx as an alternative when the claim of Maildir's uniqueness was proposed:-).
Maildir requires no locking for robust and reliable concurrent access from multiple simultaneous readers and writers.
NFS is by design and intent a stateless protocol, which has advantages. But locking is by nature a stateful operation. Sun tried, and failed, to retrofit locking onto NFS for years and years. They've shipped broken or unreliable implementations of attempts at locking protocols for over a decade now.
Sometimes, if you get lucky, you might find a specific pair of implementations, client and server, that work for one specific application, at least usually. But don't expect it, and if you should get lucky don't expect the luck to last; the next os release on client or server will probably restore the normal, non-working status.
Hence the prudent way to design network-distributed applications using NFS is to ensure that they never, ever require locking of any sort.
Use Maildir, it's your Friend.
-Bennett