[Dovecot] Best inode_ratio for maildir++ on ext4

[Ed W]

On 19/02/2010 23:51, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> 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.
>
>    

Someone posted about XFS some time back.  It apparently can perform 
well, but it will need some tuning (something to do with number of log 
buffers from memory?) to perform well on Maildir type operations

Search around and benchmark is my suggestion (there are some mail 
benchmarking programs)

Good luck

Ed W