[Dovecot] linux 2.4 vs 2.6 kernel

Adam Todorski at at proyektx.net
Tue Jul 19 04:42:24 EEST 2005


I administer a mail system at work that runs ext3 with Maildir and we
upgraded from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel in May and did notice a speed
improvement in mail store intensive tasks, like sorting.  I do not know
that the change is not due to an improved RAID array driver though.

On the other hand, my personal mail systems have always run reiserfs and
all of my data intensive servers at work run reiserfs and I have not had
a problem with any of them.  I do insist on at least some form of RAID,
preferably in hardware to minimalize the chances that I will fond out
how good my FS's recovery tools are.

good luck,
Adam

On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 18:33 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
> 
> Curtis Maloney wrote:
> 
> > Marc Perkel wrote:
> >
> >> Actually - yes. Same problem. But the solution is to use the Reiser 
> >> Filesystem. It doesn't have the ext3 problem.
> >
> >
> > Now, I don't want to start a religious war, but...
> >
> > Ext2 has the advantages that 1) it can fall back to ext2 in recovery 
> > cases, and 2) because of that, it has all the well-tested ext2 
> > recovery tools available.
> >
> > People I know who've used Reiser say it's wonderfuly fast, but if it 
> > corrupts, well... save your time, and go straight to restoring your 
> > backups.
> >
> > Also, take a look at the tune2fs options.  I understand -O dir_index 
> > will set it to use a b-tree index for faster handling of large 
> > directories.
> >
> > -- 
> > Curtis Maloney
> > cmaloney at cardgate.net
> 
> I've been using it for 5 years and it works great. It specifically 
> eliminates the speed problems of Maildir where you have thousands of 
> files in a single directory.  And it has infinite inodes so you never 
> run out of them. Reiser is ideal for email systems.
> 
-- 
Adam Todorski <at at proyektx.net>



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