best filesystem for imap server

[John Madden]

> 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


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