On 14.2.2010, at 3.31, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
With NFS if you want to avoid random errors, you still need to do the load balancing in a way that user's mails are never accessed simultaneously from two servers at the same time. See recent "quick question" thread about this. Cluster filesystems should be able to handle this better, although for performance it's probably still a good idea to do this.
I can't see how the metadata sharing of say GFS2 is going to create any serious performance impact on a cluster of dovecot servers using GFS2 and a shared SAN array especially if using maildir. If the load balancing is implemented correctly and a given user is only hitting one dovecot server at any one point in time, there should be few, if any, shared file locks. Thus, no negative impact due to shared locking.
I think that's what I said above, or at least tried to.. Well, looks like i missed a "not" there: "good idea not to do this".