[Dovecot] Best inode_ratio for maildir++ on ext4

Bernd Petrovitsch bernd at petrovitsch.priv.at
Sat Feb 20 02:05:41 EET 2010


Hi!

On Fre, 2010-02-19 at 17:18 -0600, Rodolfo Gonzalez wrote:
[...]
> This might be a silly question: which would be
Not at all IMHO.

> the best inode ratio for a 5 Tb filesystem dedicated to Maildir++
> storage? I use ubuntu server, which has a preconfigured setting for
> mkfs.ext4 called "news" with inode_ratio = 4096, and after formating the
> fs with that setting and then with the defautl setting I see this
> difference of space (wasted space, but more inodes):
> 
> 4328633696 free 1K-blocks with mkfs's "-T news" switch = 1219493877 free
> inodes
> 4557288800 free 1K-blocks with default mkfs settings = 304873461 free inodes
> 
> I'll be storing e-mail messages for around 20,000 accounts on that 
> partition (average 512 Mb per account). Would you consider worth the 
> waste of about 200 Gb of the filesystem space in exchange of more inodes?
That depends entirely if 512MB mail per account a few large ones or a
lot of small ones (assuming that the future behaviour is similar to the
past).
So perhaps it helps to count the files (and directories) on that file
system as each of them actually uses an i-node.

BTW you can set other values than "default" and "news", namely the
number directly.

	Bernd
-- 
Bernd Petrovitsch                  Email : bernd at petrovitsch.priv.at
                     LUGA : http://www.luga.at



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