Mutt Mailbox Vs Maildir

Are you using Mutt and wondering whether it's better to use mbox (mailbox) or maildir for mail storage?. I hope this post will help you decide.

Here I publish a simple benchmark results of the time it takes mutt to read/open a folder with 28.000 emails.

First, some notes about the tests:

  • software: mutt 1.5.13 compiled with +USE_HCACHE running on a Debian 4.0 server (2.6.18 kernel)
  • hardware: 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 with 2Gb of RAM
  • all this values are averages
  • all these tests are taken with disk buffers active on RAM
  • all numbers are averages times

Now, the results...

Using mbox

real    0m1.920s
user    0m1.808s
sys     0m0.112s

Using maildir without header_cache

real    0m2.599s
user    0m2.092s
sys     0m0.508s

Using maildir with header_cache

real    0m0.884s
user    0m0.732s
sys     0m0.152s

Conclusion

Based on these results, it seems the better choice is to use maildir with header_cache (BTW, header_cache doesn't work with mbox). However, this benchmarks are quite simple and don't cover all the facts so I recommend you to run the following tests before you decide:

  • This same tests with disk buffers out of RAM (use echo 3 /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches to invalidate disk buffers)
  • Using folders bigger than the available RAM
  • Taking some measures on body search times