[ceph-users] dovecot + cephfs - sdbox vs mdbox

[Danny Al-Gaaf]

Hi,

some time back we had similar discussions when we, as an email provider,
discussed to move away from traditional NAS/NFS storage to Ceph.

The problem with POSIX file systems and dovecot is that e.g. with mdbox
only around ~20% of the IO operations are READ/WRITE, the rest are
metadata IOs. You will not change this with using CephFS since it will
basically behave the same way as e.g. NFS.

We decided to develop librmb to store emails as objects directly in
RADOS instead of CephFS. The project is still under development, so you
should not use it in production, but you can try it to run a POC.

For more information check out my slides from Ceph Day London 2018:
https://dalgaaf.github.io/cephday-london2018-emailstorage/#/cover-page

The project can be found on github:
https://github.com/ceph-dovecot/

-Danny

Am 16.05.2018 um 20:37 schrieb Webert de Souza Lima:
> I'm sending this message to both dovecot and ceph-users ML so please don't
> mind if something seems too obvious for you.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have a question for both dovecot and ceph lists and below I'll explain
> what's going on.
> 
> Regarding dbox format (https://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/dbox), when
> using sdbox, a new file is stored for each email message.
> When using mdbox, multiple messages are appended to a single file until it
> reaches/passes the rotate limit.
> 
> I would like to understand better how the mdbox format impacts on IO
> performance.
> I think it's generally expected that fewer larger file translate to less IO
> and more troughput when compared to more small files, but how does dovecot
> handle that with mdbox?
> If dovecot does flush data to storage upon each and every new email is
> arrived and appended to the corresponding file, would that mean that it
> generate the same ammount of IO as it would do with one file per message?
> Also, if using mdbox many messages will be appended to a said file before a
> new file is created. That should mean that a file descriptor is kept open
> for sometime by dovecot process.
> Using cephfs as backend, how would this impact cluster performance
> regarding MDS caps and inodes cached when files from thousands of users are
> opened and appended all over?
> 
> I would like to understand this better.
> 
> Why?
> We are a small Business Email Hosting provider with bare metal, self hosted
> systems, using dovecot for servicing mailboxes and cephfs for email storage.
> 
> We are currently working on dovecot and storage redesign to be in
> production ASAP. The main objective is to serve more users with better
> performance, high availability and scalability.
> * high availability and load balancing is extremely important to us *
> 
> On our current model, we're using mdbox format with dovecot, having
> dovecot's INDEXes stored in a replicated pool of SSDs, and messages stored
> in a replicated pool of HDDs (under a Cache Tier with a pool of SSDs).
> All using cephfs / filestore backend.
> 
> Currently there are 3 clusters running dovecot 2.2.34 and ceph Jewel
> (10.2.9-4).
>  - ~25K users from a few thousands of domains per cluster
>  - ~25TB of email data per cluster
>  - ~70GB of dovecot INDEX [meta]data per cluster
>  - ~100MB of cephfs metadata per cluster
> 
> Our goal is to build a single ceph cluster for storage that could expand in
> capacity, be highly available and perform well enough. I know, that's what
> everyone wants.
> 
> Cephfs is an important choise because:
>  - there can be multiple mountpoints, thus multiple dovecot instances on
> different hosts
>  - the same storage backend is used for all dovecot instances
>  - no need of sharding domains
>  - dovecot is easily load balanced (with director sticking users to the
> same dovecot backend)
> 
> On the upcoming upgrade we intent to:
>  - upgrade ceph to 12.X (Luminous)
>  - drop the SSD Cache Tier (because it's deprecated)
>  - use bluestore engine
> 
> I was said on freenode/#dovecot that there are many cases where SDBOX would
> perform better with NFS sharing.
> In case of cephfs, at first, I wouldn't think that would be true because
> more files == more generated IO, but thinking about what I said in the
> beginning regarding sdbox vs mdbox that could be wrong.
> 
> Any thoughts will be highlt appreciated.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Webert Lima
> DevOps Engineer at MAV Tecnologia
> *Belo Horizonte - Brasil*
> *IRC NICK - WebertRLZ*
> 
> 
> 
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