[Dovecot] mail spool filesystem

[Seth Mattinen]

On 8/17/11 7:42 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.
> 

I'd have to disagree. This is completely anecdotal, but I originally
deployed ext3 on all of my mail servers (Dovecot maildir) and spools
(Postfix) until they started exhibiting loading issues when busy.
Reformatting into XFS resolved the problem with no other changes. I
didn't have time to do any comparisons or gather statistics since it was
an emergency situation and this was before ext4, but XFS has performed
flawlessly for me.

~Seth