I administer a mail system at work that runs ext3 with Maildir and we upgraded from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel in May and did notice a speed improvement in mail store intensive tasks, like sorting. I do not know that the change is not due to an improved RAID array driver though.
On the other hand, my personal mail systems have always run reiserfs and all of my data intensive servers at work run reiserfs and I have not had a problem with any of them. I do insist on at least some form of RAID, preferably in hardware to minimalize the chances that I will fond out how good my FS's recovery tools are.
good luck, Adam
On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 18:33 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote:
Curtis Maloney wrote:
Marc Perkel wrote:
Actually - yes. Same problem. But the solution is to use the Reiser Filesystem. It doesn't have the ext3 problem.
Now, I don't want to start a religious war, but...
Ext2 has the advantages that 1) it can fall back to ext2 in recovery cases, and 2) because of that, it has all the well-tested ext2 recovery tools available.
People I know who've used Reiser say it's wonderfuly fast, but if it corrupts, well... save your time, and go straight to restoring your backups.
Also, take a look at the tune2fs options. I understand -O dir_index will set it to use a b-tree index for faster handling of large directories.
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net
I've been using it for 5 years and it works great. It specifically eliminates the speed problems of Maildir where you have thousands of files in a single directory. And it has infinite inodes so you never run out of them. Reiser is ideal for email systems.
-- Adam Todorski <at@proyektx.net>