LARGE single-system Cyrus installs?

[John Madden]

> I think that this is partly because ext3 does more aggressive read ahead 
> (which would be a mixed blessing under heavy load), partly because 
> reiserfs suffers from fragmentation. I imagine that there is probably a 
> tipping point under the sort of very heavy load that Fastmail see.

I second that - reiserfs seems to be truly horrible in write-heavy
situations.  Worse, a backup of our remaining reiserfs partition takes
*days* to complete -- 165GB at ~500k/s.  And this is a 32-disk stripe of
fibre channel.

Then you see things like this:

http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/

...And you suddenly have an explanation for its performance issues.  For
us, mail delivery is the worst part.  I haven't quite figured it out
yet, but moving the three db's (mailboxes, quotas, delivery) to another
disk (on ext3) has greatly improved performance.

reiserfs' recovery tools are awful -- I watched this filesystem "fsck"
over an entire weekend recently with all kinds of nasty warnings.  It
seems reiserfs (v3 at least) is a dead product, too.

I still have concerns that moving this remaining reiserfs partition to
ext3 will make matters worse, but I have nothing else to go on.  

John



-- 
John Madden
Sr. UNIX Systems Engineer
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana
jmadden at ivytech.edu