On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 21:28 -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
On Friday, May 29 at 09:46 AM, quoth Curtis Maloney:
This is certainly one advantage dbox and maildir have -- not being limited to the FS file size limit per folder.
That's not *entirely* accurate. Certainly no single message can exceed the 2GB limit even with maildir, and the other issue that begins to come up is the impact/effect of large numbers of files. Depending on the filesystem (I'm assuming ext2?), there's probably a hard limit on
FC4 had ext3 (unless my memory is totally mistaken).
the number of files per directory, and almost certainly there's a big
Subdirectories, yes (because the link count in the inode is of quite finite size). But there never was TTBOMK a limit on the number of files (!= Directories) in ext2 (except the trivial one: The directory is as large as the largest file. But that applies probably to all filesystems - though more recent ones allow for much larger files). Let alone ext3.
performance penalty for that many files. To get good performance with Maildir and really large folders, you need a filesystem that can handle large numbersof files. Ext3 has directory hashing, ReiserFS is
Make sure you have the "dir_index" option set on that filesystem (which
is probably set per default anyways these days. Otherwise you can change
it on the fly with tune2fs).
The back of my head suggests that one has to recreate the directory
after changing that option (read: mkdir new; mv old/* new; rmdir old; mv new old. Solving the "command line too long" problem is left to the
reader;-).
good... I believe XFS and several others have tackled the problem as well (I don't know about FFS).
That said... eGADS - a real life FC4 in the wild?!?! According to fedoraproject.org:
For 20030101-20050607 there are a potential 863 CVE named vulnerabilities that could have affected FC4 packages. 759 (88%) of those are fixed because FC4 includes an upstream version that includes a fix, 10 (1%) are still outstanding, and 94 (11%) are fixed with a backported patch.That would make me a little nervous.... that's just the issues over the course of two years, ending in 2005 (FOUR years ago).
I don't know what/how others do but many servers are not really "in the wild" but behind more recent firewalls and/or loadbalancers and/or similar equipment (like running database servers behind webservers).
And "running FC4" doesn't mean that that certain/some/several/many packages aren't replaced by more recent ones - for whatever reason (security, performance, newer version, newer drivers in the kernel, ...).
For a "pristine FC4 with lots of services directly at the Internet": I totally agree with you.
Apart from the basic question if one shouldn't better run a more conservative distribution (like RHEL) in the first place where the support cycle is much longer.
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