Mailstore filesystem

[Phil Brutsche]

Søren Schimkat wrote:
> Hi guys
> 
> I'm about to migrate from Solaris with Sendmail / uw to Redhat 
> Enterprise Linux with Postfix / Cyrus. Everything seems to work just 
> fine, but one unsolved question remains: Which filesystem should I choose?
> 
> I really would like to use ext3 .. because it's works great and seems 
> rock solid, but i'm scareed shitless of inode starvation. Any thoughts 
> on that one?
> 
> Which filesystem would you recomend?

ext3, hands down.

It's rock-solid and well-tested and won't eat the *entire* FS after a
crash (*cough* ReiserFS *cough*)
The real biggie... it won't eat your mail spool if you have an
unexpected crash (*cough* XFS, JFS, ReiserFS without journaled data *cough*)

IMO inode starvation is a non-issue with ext3, or any other file system
for that matter.

We have a 100GB RAID5 (5x 36GB) for our mail spool containing approx
65GB of data and approx 5.9 million messages (well, really 3.9 million
once you count the single-instance message store)... our disk space is
being used up faster than the FS inodes.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at optimumdata.com