On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 10:05 -0800, Seth Mattinen wrote:
Proskurin Kirill wrote:
Frank Bonnet wrote:
I use Debian amd64 with maildir. It works. Nothing really to say about it. It's never given me any trouble and nobody ever complains about performance. Easy to restore specific messages from backups when customers accidentally delete messages.
~Seth
Thank you Seth :-)
But with your storage you must think about backup strategies. Rsync + maildir = many time
The other option is LVM snapshots or a filesystem that has snapshots like ZFS. Just don't use ext3 with snapshots on a busy server - it's a horrible performer because it's block-based. Extent-based ones like xfs perform much better and you can "freeze" an xfs filesystem so the snapshot is consistent.
This is about MySQL but it has some good information: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster-lvm-performance-in-s...
And this Ars article describes the basic snapshot procedure for those unfamiliar with it: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2004/10/linux-20041013.ars
In addition, the rsync 'slowness' issue can be alleviated by breaking it up into smaller pieces (And version 3.0 is helpful). Since many files/directories on a single volume has been an issue for many filesystems for many years, some sort of directory management is usually already in place which you can use to break up rsync into smaller chunks.
Rick