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LDA Indexing
============

LDA's indexing basically does two things while message is being saved:

 1. It updates the main index file.
     * This improves performance with <mbox> [MailboxFormat.mbox.txt] format,
       especially if 'mbox_very_dirty_syncs=no'.
     * With <Maildir> [MailboxFormat.Maildir.txt] the benefits of this are
       almost irrelevant.
 2. It updates the 'dovecot.index.cache' file.

Cache file
----------

The LDA also updates the cache file, which can be very useful with all mailbox
formats. It means that when an IMAP client wants to fetch the message's
metadata (e.g. some header fields), they're can be retrieved from the cache
file and Dovecot doesn't have to open and parse the message file. There are
some tradeoffs though:

 * LDA indexing wastes disk I/O because it has to open and update index files
 * LDA indexing saves disk I/O because it already has the message body in
   memory, so it doesn't need to read it from disk.
 * IMAP indexing wastes disk I/O because it has to open and read message files
 * IMAP indexing may save disk I/O because IMAP process always has index files
   opened, and many IMAP clients are configured to download all new message
   bodies anyway, so the second time message bodies are read they're already in
   memory

So it depends on IMAP client if it's faster to use LDA or IMAP time indexing.
In any case the user experience is typically faster with LDA indexing, because
the message list metadata can be returned faster when it's pre-indexed.

See <IndexFiles.txt> for more information about what the index files contain.

Non-indexed mail delivery
-------------------------

Ignoring the benefits of cache file updates, the only thing left is the main
index updates. As mentioned above, with Maildir format these benefits are very
small. This also means that it's perfectly fine to use a non-Dovecot MDA to
deliver mails that doesn't update indexes. Dovecot can efficiently see and
index such new mails without doing anything expensive like "rebuilding
indexes".

(This file was created from the wiki on 2019-06-19 12:42)