[Dovecot] Performance-Tuning

[Jan-Frode Myklebust]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:34:02AM +0100, Peer Heinlein wrote:
> > > I have>  11 TB hard used Mailstorage, saved als maildir in ext3 on
> > > HP EVA.
> > 
> > You have 11 TB of mails on a non cluster filesystem?
> 
> Yes. 
> 
> I don't believe a clustered filesystem would have more performance and 
> would be more rock solid.
> 
> I don't have a problem  on my frontend server. Why should I have two or 
> more of them? I have a problem in my backend. My SAN has too much to do. 
> Why should a cluster filesystem be better for my SAN?

Agree. A non-clustered fs should give you better performance, and
probably also be more reliable, if you can live with the SPoF and
full downtime during patching/upgrades/maintenance. But I would expect
xfs to be a better choice than ext*.

We have about the same storage size as you (12TB/115M-inodes), with
the backup-process almost biting itself in the tail every day, but I
can't quite imagine running it all on a single local fs with no scale-out
options if we should want/need more processing power for dovecot. I'm
looking forward to moving to mdbox soonish.. to reduce the number of
files and speed up the backup process.


  -jf