Andy Cravens acravens@uen.org wrote:

I've been testing with alpha 3 and I am about ready to go production. I am switching from mbox to maildir and I'd like to know if there is a formula or rule of thumb for determining if your file system will have enough inodes to handle all the mail message files.

I could write a script to look at each user's mbox files, count the number messages and calculate the average number of emails per user, then add a fudge factor for expected growth. However, I doubt anybody actually goes to this much trouble to plan ahead. Or do they?

I'm running Solaris 9 and when I created the file system I just used the defaults. If I need to change anything, I'd rather do it before going production. Thanks for any info you can provide on this subject.

I've been down this path before -- I recently completed a transition from UW IMAP to Dovecot and from mbx files to maildir -- in other words from about 160 GIGANTIC files to zillions of tiny files. The aggregate size was just slightly over 2 gigabytes.

I used a fragment size of 1024 and a NBPI (number of blocks per inode) of 2048 and find that I didn't quite achieve the balance between blocks free and inodes free that I'd wanted. Not a big deal since I don't have hundreds of users and can always copy the filesystem if I feel compelled to deal with the inode count. So if this isn't as easy for you, you'll probably want to do better than my SWAG. In any case, I probably underestimated the number of files with large attachments in my own mail archive.