[CentOS] Filesystem for Maildir

[Christopher Chan]

Heitor Augusto M Cardozo wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> In last year, i had made some research and benchmarks based on CentOS 4 
> to know which filesystem is better for Maildir:  ReiserFS, XFS or EXT3.
> 
> My conclusion was as follows:
> 
> - EXT3: reliable but very slow to read many small files.
> - ReiserFS: best performance but unreliable and bad recovery tools.
> - XFS: My choice, good performance and reliability.

I would contest the last two.

> 
> On CentOS 5.0, a had the same benchmarks and now, EXT3 and XFS seems to 
> had better or equivalent performance on Read and Create Random files. 
> One of this tests, using bonnie++, show this:
> 
> # bonnie++ -d /mnt/sdc1/testfile -s 8192 -m `hostname` -n 
> 50:150000:5000:1000

bonnie++? Not appropriate. Try this: 
http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04/

And add JFS to the mix. You will be surprised.

> 
> What i want to know is: Anyone use or recommend EXT3 for Maildir?

If you do not have full blown battery back for write caches yes.

> 
> My configuration: 3Ware 9650SE-8LPML, 8 drives SATA2  ST3500630AS 500GB 
> on RAID 10.
> 

Add BBU and XFS or JFS should do.