[Dovecot] linux 2.4 vs 2.6 kernel

vmstech vmstech at tpg.com.au
Tue Jul 19 05:16:05 EEST 2005


> Now, I don't want to start a religious war, but...
cool a religious war...

A quick google shows that most of the discussion on these things took
place years ago (2001-2003)  & not a lot thats current, so its hard to
know what still applies.

> 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.

ReiserFS does seems just like the ducksnuts in terms of performance, but
it seems to have accumulated some horror stories along the way:
http://www.linuxsa.org.au/pipermail/linuxsa/2002-January/038035.html

Marcs being runing it for 5 years, no issues - any one else using it?

It also seems a non-trivial to convert an existing ext3 install. I don't
have hands on access to the box ($75 for remote hands on), so resizing
the partition, convertfs to new partition, rebooting, deleting old
partion resising new partion all seems a bit daunting when I cant
actually sit at the console JIC if I stuff up along the way. 

If I'm going to go to that effort, I should probably contemplate xfs and
jfs and make best choise first up - anyone got any experience with these
where maildir is concerned?



> 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.
> 
Check this out relating to this option:
http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html
I haven't fully digested but it seems that ext3 doesn't get close, +
there are other caveats.

All this information is quite old, and I wonder whats changed since
then, both for rieser and ext3, also [xj]fs, which were considered
pre-natal when most of these were written.

So is anyone out there using ext3 with our without dir_index for
significant maildir imap installs and just delighted with it?

Thanks all
Glenn

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.
> >
> >
> > -- 
> > 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.
> 



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