[Dovecot] Recommended FS for Dovecot Maildir

[Udo Rader]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 17:24 +0100, Daniel Watts wrote:
> >
> >
> > Brent Clark wrote:
> >> Daniel Watts wrote:
> >>> Could I possibly have some feedback on what the recommended 
> >>> filesystems are? I've heard of ReiserFS but was wondering what other 
> >>> options there are and how they compare.
> >>
> >>
> > Reiser has traditionally been a very good choice for maildir because 
> > it has infinite inodes, it is very fast on directories with large 
> > numbers of files, and it does sub allocation so small files take less 
> > space. And it's very fast. Maildir is the area where Reiser does best.
> 
> Thanks for this - I have heared many maildir admins laud Reiser. How is 
> it for ongoing stability and reliability? I suppose with using any 
> non-mainstream technology (ie ext stuff) the admins concern is that it 
> is less well tested for bugs and corruption.

three or four years ago we had a major reiserfs corruption due to faulty
memory modules (as I know now). The result was a completely unusable and
unrepairable partition that could eventually, after two weeks or so, be
repaired with the help of Hans Reiser himself. Even though I really
appreciated direct involvement of the main developer, I will avoid it by
any means.

> Eg i see many people saying xfs is great but who wouldn't think of 
> having it put into production.

XFS is one of the most mature filesystems around for UNIX systems. It
has been developed by SGI for its IRIX OS for a _very_ long time. If
POSIX compliance (ACLs!!), out of the box quota support, scalability (up
to 9 million terabytes max. capacity, IIRC), sophisticated
backup/restore facitilites (including snapshots and more), online file
defragmentation and much more are of importance for you, then go for
XFS ... well, and you certainly guessed it, we are using it for almost
all of our servers :-)

Regards

Udo Rader

-- 
BestSolution.at EDV Systemhaus GmbH
http://www.bestsolution.at
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