[Dovecot] mail spool filesystem

[Rick Romero]

Quoting Nick Rosier <nick+dovecot at bunbun.be>:

> Kelsey Cummings wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 03:48:00AM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>>> On 8/17/2011 9:42 AM, Adrian Ulrich wrote:
>>>>> I read that XFS is a good choice, but is not
>>>>> too reliable...
>>>> Are you using Maildir or MBOX?
>>>>
>>>> In any case: XFS would be my last choice:
>>>>
>>>> XFS is nice if you are working with large files (>  2GB), but
>>>> for E-Mail i'd stick with ext3 (or maybe even reiser3)
>>>> as it works very well with small files.
>>> XFS was designed for parallelism, whether with large files or small,
>> ...
>>
>> Anyone been using ZFS on FreeBSD for mail spool storage?
>>
> I'm using ZFS on FreeBSD 8.2. But to be honest, this is a  
> personal/private mail-system with limited mailboxes. I really like  
> the snapshots in ZFS. Every night I make a snapshot which I send to  
> another server for backup. Every hour I make a new snapshot from  
> which I send the incremental to the backup-server. That way if the  
> worst happens I will only loose 1 hour of mail.
>
> ZFS was built for data integrity, not speed so if it's speed you are  
> looking for this might not be the fastest but maybe fast enough.

I just migrated to FreeBSD 8.2 ZFS (6 drive u320 raidz + 16GB mirrored  
SSD ZIL) from OpenSolaris ZFS (10 drive sata raidz10).  About 4k daily  
users.
The new setup feels a little faster than the old, but honestly the old  
ran just fine under normal load.  One of the things that pushed the  
migration was really more CPU for Thunderbird clients using  
compression, which caused a noticeable delay.

Ditto on the snapshots.

Rick