Mailstore filesystem

[Phil Pennock]

On 2006-07-03 at 15:44 +0200, Daniel Eckl wrote:
> At the moment I have a temporary machine running the same system with
> reiserfs. While I still have the problem of occasional high load, the
> system now never freezes or hangs, just slowes down.

On my private machine at home, I used ReiserFS until very recently; I
had assumed that the negative publicity was scare-mongering based on
historical problems and that by this time any problems would have been
sorted out.  I didn't believe the adage, "If you use ReiserFS and
haven't lost data, then you haven't been using it for long enough."

/home partition held regular /home, plus Cyrus IMAP content and a
document repository updated nightly by rsync; the load is almost always
trivial.  Over-night, the load comes from:

 * occasional cron-jobs updating data; those should be read-only,
   storing to /var/, so irrelevant
 * the rsync of the documents
 * Cyrus IMAP mail deliveries and squatter, etc.

It is rather disconcerting to see files which exist as directory entries
but where the inode (or whatever its equivalent is) doesn't exist so
that stat() fails.  Race-conditions, fine, but this wasn't that.

I bought an external HDD to spool the data off and migrated to xfs.

Given this experience with a lightly-loaded system, I've joined the camp
of "never use ReiserFS for production usage with data you value".  I
might consider using it for a Squid cache, I suppose.
-- 
"Everything has three factors: politics, money, and the right way to do it.
 In that order."  -- Gary Donahue