best filesystem for imap server

[Jules Agee]

John Madden wrote:
>>I dont want to start a religious battle, but could I have some opinions
>>on filesystems for a 100ish user imap server? I have 2x 250G western
>>digital disks to use.
> 
> 
> I think the performance of those disks (and the RAID you put on them) will
> be much more significant that the filesystem you use, considering the size
> of your user population.  And given that factor, I'd say that even ext3
> won't give you any problems performance-wise.  Still, reiserfs, IMO, would
> be preferable for mail files.

The problems you run into when using ext3 depend less on how many users 
you have than how many messages those users put into individual folders. 
Even with 100 users, if they are heavy users, you can have noticable 
slowdowns if many of them keep more than 5000 messages in their INBOX. 
Using a filesystem without indexes means each fs access will run a 
linear scan through the list of files in the directory. Of course, 
having more users compounds the problem.

I agree with the RAID-1 suggestion. At least use the md driver to run a 
mirror. I did this on an old box a while back, mirrored two IDE drives 
using Linux's software RAID, for a box with over 100 users, and it 
worked well.

-- 
Jules Agee
System Administrator
Pacific Coast Feather Co.
julesa at pcf.com      x284
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