best filesystem for imap server

[Rob Tanner]

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.

Thanks,
Rob


--On Wednesday, December 01, 2004 12:14:01 PM -0800 David Lang
<david.lang at digitalinsight.com> wrote:

> I've done some testing and seen a HUGE speedup when switching from EXT2/3
> to XFS. unfortunantly I haven't had a chance to do the same comparison with
> Reiserfs (I need to, but haven't had time)
> 
> I was even able to see a dramatic difference with a single user accessing a
> fairly large mailbox (thousands of messages in the inbox)
> 
> David Lang
> 


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

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