On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 21:28 -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday, May 29 at 09:46 AM, quoth Curtis Maloney:
> > This is certainly one advantage dbox and maildir have -- not being 
> > limited to the FS file size limit per folder.
> 
> That's not *entirely* accurate. Certainly no single message can exceed 
> the 2GB limit even with maildir, and the other issue that begins to 
> come up is the impact/effect of large numbers of files. Depending on 
> the filesystem (I'm assuming ext2?), there's probably a hard limit on 

FC4 had ext3 (unless my memory is totally mistaken).

> the number of files per directory, and almost certainly there's a big 

Subdirectories, yes (because the link count in the inode is of quite
finite size).
But there never was TTBOMK a limit on the number of files (!=
Directories) in ext2 (except the trivial one: The directory is as large
as the largest file. But that applies probably to all filesystems -
though more recent ones allow for much larger files).
Let alone ext3.

> performance penalty for that many files. To get good performance with 
> Maildir and really large folders, you need a filesystem that can 
> handle large numbersof files. Ext3 has directory hashing, ReiserFS is 

Make sure you have the "dir_index" option set on that filesystem (which
is probably set per default anyways these days. Otherwise you can change
it on the fly with `tune2fs`).
The back of my head suggests that one has to recreate the directory
after changing that option (read: `mkdir new; mv old/* new; rmdir old;
mv new old`. Solving the "command line too long" problem is left to the
reader;-).

> good... I believe XFS and several others have tackled the problem as 
> well (I don't know about FFS).
> 
> That said... eGADS - a real life FC4 in the wild?!?! According to 
> fedoraproject.org:
> 
>     For 20030101-20050607 there are a potential 863 CVE named
>     vulnerabilities that could have affected FC4 packages. 759 (88%)
>     of those are fixed because FC4 includes an upstream version that
>     includes a fix, 10 (1%) are still outstanding, and 94 (11%) are
>     fixed with a backported patch.
> 
> That would make me a little nervous.... that's just the issues over 
> the course of two years, ending in 2005 (FOUR years ago).

I don't know what/how others do but many servers are not really "in the
wild" but behind more recent firewalls and/or loadbalancers and/or
similar equipment (like running database servers behind webservers).

And "running FC4" doesn't mean that that certain/some/several/many
packages aren't replaced by more recent ones - for whatever reason
(security, performance, newer version, newer drivers in the
kernel, ...).

For a "pristine FC4 with lots of services directly at the Internet": I
totally agree with you.

Apart from the basic question if one shouldn't better run a more
conservative distribution (like RHEL) in the first place where the
support cycle is much longer.

	Bernd
-- 
Firmix Software GmbH                   http://www.firmix.at/
mobil: +43 664 4416156                 fax: +43 1 7890849-55
          Embedded Linux Development and Services


