On Fri, 05 May 2006 17:24:29 +0100 Daniel Watts d@nielwatts.com 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.
Eg i see many people saying xfs is great but who wouldn't think of having it put into production.
XFS is in the kernel for quite some time already. I've been quite doubtful about trying other filesystems in the past, but last year I started some tests and my experiences are very positive. I've both xfs and ext3 in use on production machines -- and ufs with softupdates enabled on the BSD side of things.
I'm not going to make a recommendation because I don't know enough about filesystems vs mailserver performance, but those of the filesystems I've tried have been working very reliably and integrate as good with my systems as classic ext2 does. I've had one case of minor fs corruption, and that turned out to be a faulty disk.
In real life on general purpose servers, the gains have been quite marginal, though. Filesystem change isn't a miracle cure for performance problems, obviously; if that's the problem, more disks to spread the transactions over make a much bigger difference I/O wise.
Regards,
Wouter