[Dovecot] Best inode_ratio for maildir++ on ext4

[Stan Hoeppner]

Rodolfo Gonzalez put forth on 2/19/2010 5:18 PM:
> Hi,
> 
> This might be a silly question: which would be
> the best inode ratio for a 5 Tb filesystem dedicated to Maildir++
> storage? I use ubuntu server, which has a preconfigured setting for
> mkfs.ext4 called "news" with inode_ratio = 4096, and after formating the
> fs with that setting and then with the defautl setting I see this
> difference of space (wasted space, but more inodes):
> 
> 4328633696 free 1K-blocks with mkfs's "-T news" switch = 1219493877 free
> inodes
> 4557288800 free 1K-blocks with default mkfs settings = 304873461 free
> inodes
> 
> I'll be storing e-mail messages for around 20,000 accounts on that
> partition (average 512 Mb per account). Would you consider worth the
> waste of about 200 Gb of the filesystem space in exchange of more inodes?

If your version of Ubuntu server has XFS support built in, forget ext4 and go
XFS.  It's more reliable, faster in every single benchmark I've seen especially
for large numbers of files, both large and small, has a ton of management tools
and instrumentation interfaces, and has a proven enterprise track record.

-- 
Stan