On 27/02/2010 10:08, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Terry Barnum put forth on 2/26/2010 4:20 PM:
The 500MB+, 5k+ message problem is with another mailserver not running postfix/dovecot. It's the reason I've started investigating postfix with your software and so far I"m very happy.
Hi Terry,
If it is remotely a possibility, I'd recommend going with Linux instead of OSX. Going Linux gets you access to the XFS filesystem which gives the best overall performance for maildirs. It seems very likely that your current production server is suffering at 5K files and 500MB mailboxen due to a deficient filesystem, among other things. I'm partial to Debian Stable (Lenny) myself. I use mbox with XFS due to the fact I archive all my list mail and thus generate some pretty large mbox files, growing every day. If I decide to switch to or add maildirs later, I've already got the filesystem that performs best for both worlds.
XFS offers some nice features such as resize of partitions and snapshots, however, it appears to sometimes need some tuning for small file write applications? (adjust log buffers I think?). (Some people have also suffered dataloss in the event of sudden powerloss - bad interactions with the writeback cache.. Obviously likely with any filesystem though)
You might also want to benchmark Ext4 since it's apparently now considered stable and easy to migrate from ext3. Google apparently are migrating internally from ext2 to ext4 having benchmarked it to be similar speed to XFS (for *their* workloads!)
Ed W