Performance question...

[Rob Siemborski]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Etienne Goyer wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 01:11:30AM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> >   3. A proper filesystem (ext2 and ext3 in default non-btree mode, aren't.
> >      I doubt UFS is any better).
>
> I hear that often but don't give it much credence.  We use ext3 in a
> Murder with 70K accounts and two backends.  We have no performance
> problem.  Actually, the performance is better than I envisionned at
> first.  I don't pretend to have done extensive file system comparison,
> but I guess if the default fs of your OS is fast *enough*, there is no
> reasons to go with non-standard filesystem.  Actually, from a practical
> sysadmin point of view, you would be better sticking with well-known and
> well-tested default that have well-known and well-tested tools (fsck,
> debugfs, etc).
>
> If I where to build a mailsystem with many hundreds of thousands or
> millions account, that would be another story of course.

Note that a simple "number of accounts" metric is generally insufficient
to determine how much horsepower you need -- knowing the demographic of
your users is necessary as well..

Also, the cautions about ext2 are because you need to make sure it is
doing synchronous writes in order to be truly safe, which can be a
significant performance hit.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper

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