[Dovecot] XFS vs EXT4 for mail storage

[Charles Marcus]

On 2013-05-03 8:34 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
> I assume /var will hold user mail dirs.

Yes, in /var/vmail

> Do /var/ and /snaps reside on the same RAID array, physical disks?

Yes - vmware host is a Dell R515, with ESXi installed to mirrored 
internal SATA drives, with 8 drives in RAID 10 for all of the VMs. All 
storage is this local storage (no SAN/NAS).

> How about the other filesystems I snipped? If you have a large number 
> of filesystems atop the same RAID, some of them being XFS, this could 
> create a head thrashing problem under high load increasing latency and 
> thus response times.

Ouch...

This ESXi host also hosts 2 server 2008R2 vms...

> Would you mind posting: ~$ xfs_info /dev/vg/var

  # xfs_info /dev/vg/var
meta-data=/dev/mapper/vg-var     isize=256    agcount=4, agsize=45875200 
blks
          =                       sectsz=512   attr=2
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=183500800, imaxpct=25
          =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=89600, version=2
          =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

> ~$ xfs_info /dev/vg/snaps 

  # xfs_info /dev/vg/snaps
meta-data=/dev/mapper/vg-snaps   isize=256    agcount=4, agsize=262144 blks
          =                       sectsz=512   attr=2
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=1048576, imaxpct=25
          =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=2560, version=2
          =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

Thanks again Stan...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles