[Dovecot] Recommended FS for Dovecot Maildir

[Wouter Van Hemel]

On Tue, 09 May 2006 19:48:19 -0500
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 19:32, Wouter Van Hemel wrote:
> 
> > IIRC all typical filesystems for Linux (ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) use
> > directory indexing, usually by means of a b-tree.
> 
> They are optional on ext3 and I don't think they are on
> by default.
> 

That, I don't know either, but it would make more sense if they would be.

> If the main use is a mail server with maildir storage the speed
> of creating/deleting files is going to the the main factor.
> 

That depends on one's priorities.

I would go for reliability and recovery possibility. Those are different
requirements, but as valid. Web content can be uploaded easily, but
mailbox recovery is a messy affair. I've not had a machine with i/o being
the limiting factor -- at least for imap mailbox storage.

I suppose one could shave off some milliseconds, but that hasn't been my
priority for mailbox storage servers. And personally, I would first try to
get the mailqueue (if any) and dovecot's indexes on another disk.

Apart from those considerations, I totally agree that it makes sense to
look at filesystems that deal well with operations on small files.

> > In the past, I've spent (wasted) quite some time benchmarking things
> > like FreeBSD vs Linux, Perl vs PHP, template systems, etc. Now I
> > believe that people should just pick what they feel comfortable with,
> > because the differences are often not that large and it's rarely
> > worth their time and money.
> 
> Well, now you can usually afford to throw a few more gigs of
> RAM in and let buffering solve the problem.  That used to
> be much more expensive.
> 

True.