best filesystem for imap server

[Rob Tanner]

The MTA is postfix and it is on a separate spindle -- the RAID is exclusively
for the IMAP mailstore.  My setup includes two boxes that are MTA only and
includes antivirus scanning of email, etc. One is primarily internal mail and
the other is the primary external gateway.  Neither of thses machines exhibit
performance problems under load similar to the box running the cyrus server.
Are there any postfix -> lmtp -> imap optimizations that you know of that I
might implement?

Thanks,
Rob

--On Wednesday, December 01, 2004 05:12:57 PM -0500 John Madden
<jmadden at ivytech.edu> wrote:

>> This is interesting because I have a linux box (RedHat AS3) using RAID
>> 10.  I have some 5000 user accounts and anywhere from 2500 to 3000
>> concurrent IMAP sessions -- I think the Mulberry client opens multiple
>> sessions since it's only some 300 to 500 individual concurrent users.
>> Anyway, what I especially notice is that when the mail delivery queue on
>> the MTA gets very large, which happens occassionally, the CPU load
>> average goes way up and iowait time as displayed using top can exceed
>> 300% on a four processor box and performance goes all to heck.  Is
>> switching the filesystem to XFS likely to help this situation?  Since
>> there is some 80GB of mail spool currently in use, switching the
>> filesystem to XFS is not a simple task and I don't won't to do it on a
>> lark.
> 
> This sounds a lot like a problem with the MTA, not necessarily the
> filesystem alone.  Put your mail queue on a separate spindle if possible,
> first off, and make sure it's not doing anything "silly," as many MTA's
> have been known to do.
> 
> John
> 
> 
> PS: if($MTA ne "Postfix) { changeMTA(); }
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> John Madden
> UNIX Systems Engineer
> Ivy Tech State College
> jmadden at ivytech.edu
> 
> 



-- 
Rob Tanner
UNIX Services Manager
Linfield College, McMinnville OR

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