On Tue, 09 May 2006 19:48:19 -0500 Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 19:32, Wouter Van Hemel wrote:
IIRC all typical filesystems for Linux (ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) use directory indexing, usually by means of a b-tree.
They are optional on ext3 and I don't think they are on by default.
That, I don't know either, but it would make more sense if they would be.
If the main use is a mail server with maildir storage the speed of creating/deleting files is going to the the main factor.
That depends on one's priorities.
I would go for reliability and recovery possibility. Those are different requirements, but as valid. Web content can be uploaded easily, but mailbox recovery is a messy affair. I've not had a machine with i/o being the limiting factor -- at least for imap mailbox storage.
I suppose one could shave off some milliseconds, but that hasn't been my priority for mailbox storage servers. And personally, I would first try to get the mailqueue (if any) and dovecot's indexes on another disk.
Apart from those considerations, I totally agree that it makes sense to look at filesystems that deal well with operations on small files.
In the past, I've spent (wasted) quite some time benchmarking things like FreeBSD vs Linux, Perl vs PHP, template systems, etc. Now I believe that people should just pick what they feel comfortable with, because the differences are often not that large and it's rarely worth their time and money.
Well, now you can usually afford to throw a few more gigs of RAM in and let buffering solve the problem. That used to be much more expensive.
True.