[Dovecot] Recommended FS for Dovecot Maildir

[Wouter Van Hemel]

On Fri, 05 May 2006 17:24:29 +0100
Daniel Watts <d at nielwatts.com> 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.
> 
> Eg i see many people saying xfs is great but who wouldn't think of 
> having it put into production.

XFS is in the kernel for quite some time already. I've been quite
doubtful about trying other filesystems in the past, but last year I
started some tests and my experiences are very positive. I've both xfs and
ext3 in use on production machines -- and ufs with softupdates enabled on
the BSD side of things.

I'm not going to make a recommendation because I don't know enough about
filesystems vs mailserver performance, but those of the filesystems I've
tried have been working very reliably and integrate as good with my
systems as classic ext2 does. I've had one case of minor fs corruption,
and that turned out to be a faulty disk.

In real life on general purpose servers, the gains have been quite
marginal, though. Filesystem change isn't a miracle cure for performance
problems, obviously; if that's the problem, more disks to spread the
transactions over make a much bigger difference I/O wise.


Regards,

  Wouter