Cyrus IMAP running in linux: recommended file system

[David Lang]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2010, Lucas Zinato Carraro wrote:

> I know that this question is controversy and there is no exact answer.
>
> But  currently what is the best file system in  Linux to handle
> thousands of small files?
> I have mailboxes with 4Gb. And messages with ~4Kb.
> Ext4 ?

depending on who you ask you will get

ext4
btrfs
XFS

my personal opinion is that ext4 is still new enought that I don't trust it 
fully (they are still finding too many problems and having to scramble to fix 
them)

this makes btrfs much too new.

so I opt for XFS

you want to avoid ext2/ext3 as they do very poorly with large numbers of files 
in one directory.

jfs and reiserfs (both 3 and 4) are options, but they are both used so seldom 
that I would not be comfortable trusting them.


some people consider ext4 well tested enough, and then the debate between it and 
XFS gets much more interesting.

Ted Tso will tell you that ext4 is only extensivly tested in the simple cases 
(single drive, home system type of thing), while XFS has had a lot of attention 
and testing on very large and sophisticated drive systems, so the larger and 
more powerful the drive subsystem you have the more likely you are to run into 
some corner case that the ext4 developers just haven't run into yet, but that 
the XFS developers have handled.

David Lang