Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 00:24:23 +0100 From: Daniel Watts <d@nielwatts.com> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Recommended FS for Dovecot Maildir To: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@gmail.com>

Can you remember any general findings?

Thanks to all for responding in this thread - I am reading them all
and making notes. All very useful information.

Can I phrase the question in a different way? Of those of you who are running 10,000+ user system - what FS do you use? Or do you all use special file servers (netapps, emc etc?) with proprietary filesystems?

Daniel

We're probably right at your 10000 user threshold, but we're an ISP
so we get a LOT of mail traffic. Our mail system consists of dual
exim servers processing incoming mail, writing to maildirs on a home- built NFS system. The home-built system is a dual-xeon machine with
lots of SATA disks in a RAID5. We then have two client-facing
machines running dovecot and squirrelmail.

These are all SuperMicro servers running RedHat ES 4. They all use
SATA disks. We are using EXT3 for the RAID5 filesystem, and I have
had no performance issues to speak of. I had considered Reiser or
xfs, but as I have limited experience with either filesystem I didn't
feel comfortable using them in production.

-- Roger J. Weeks Systems & Network Administrator Mendocino Community Network