[Dovecot] Recommended FS for Dovecot Maildir

[Sergey Ivanov]

Daniel Watts wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> Brent Clark wrote:
>>> Daniel Watts wrote:
>>>> Could I possibly have some feedback on what the recommended
>>>> filesystems are? I've heard of ReiserFS but was wondering what other
>>>> options there are and how they compare.
>>>
>>>
>> Reiser has traditionally been a very good choice for maildir because
>> it has infinite inodes, it is very fast on directories with large
>> numbers of files, and it does sub allocation so small files take less
>> space. And it's very fast. Maildir is the area where Reiser does best.
> 
> Thanks for this - I have heared many maildir admins laud Reiser. How is
> it for ongoing stability and reliability? I suppose with using any
> non-mainstream technology (ie ext stuff) the admins concern is that it
> is less well tested for bugs and corruption.
I was using reiserfs with maildir till September 2004, and since then
switched to reiser4. It works much better for me, that means economy in
space, improvement in speed and reliability. Including successful
repairing not only after power failures, but even after my own mistakes
like running for a short time fsck.ext3 on reiser4 partition with
"fixing" it.
But you should be aware, now Reiser4 is trying to get into mainstream
kernel, and to comply with requirements they rewrite their code. For my
opinion the most stable was the patch for 2.6.12 kernel. With newer
versions you may experience problems under a very high load (approx.
2,000,000 messages with ~100 msg/sec being stored).
I have never experienced such problems for a small server with 10 users,
4Gb storage and about a thousand msg/day received.
Reiser4 outperforms reiserfs in all parameters, especially in reliability.
-- 
	Sergey.