Recomendations for a 15000 Cyrus Mailboxes

[Bron Gondwana]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 12:41:11PM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> >>Please specify those weaknesses.  250,000 mailboxes on reiserfs right
> >>now, always open to options.
> >The main problem I'm aware of is that in the event of a "problem",
> >reiserfsck 1) can take a long time (like weeks) to complete, 2) doesn't
> >necessarily fix the problems.  ext3 doesn't have these problems.
> 
> Agree, best to use a current version of ext3.

This is one of the reasons we don't use giant partitions - it takes
about 6 hours to reiserfsck a data partition now, which is affordable
while your replica is running fine.

Reiserfs uses the BKL.  This is a downside - we're not sure how much
that's hurting scalability, but we know it's less than ext3 does (as 
of the end of last year)

To be honest, if your hardware is flaky and throwing RAID errors, then
reiserfs is the least of your worries.  Get better hardware already.
Sheesh.  I can see the argument against running reiserfs on your single
hard-drive laptop (though I do for the partition with my offlineimap's
Maildir and a bunch of other non-essential stuff where speed matters
more and it gets replicated frequently).

But on serious production mail hardware[tm]?  We have replication, we
have backups, and we have performance under heavy load which just
doesn't compare to anything else we've tried.

(I notice that nobody much mentions JFS.  Apart from the fact that
 SCO "owns" it through viral thingamy)

Bron.