[CentOS] Filesystem for Maildir

[Christopher Chan]

Heitor Augusto M Cardozo wrote:
> Christopher Chan wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> I had two bad experiences with ReiserFS in our Mail Server, reiserfsck 
> is too slow and lost data.

Well, not on that...reiserfs assumes perfect media according to the 
complaints of some who use reiser so bad blocks could cause even the 
entire loss of the filesystem...not to mention that RH and therefore 
Centos (I wonder about plus...) does not support/maintain reiserfs.

> 
> IMHO ReiserFS have the best performance for Maildir but its only safe on 
> production if you´re sure that the system I/O will never fail.

What does fsbench say? It has the best writing performance too?!?

>>>
>>> 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.
>>
> I already done tests with fsbench and the results on CentOS 4.5 were 
> equivalent: the performance of XFS was much higher than EXT3.
> 
> Then, i retest using fsbench, bonnie++ and iozone on CentOS 5.0, and the 
> results now show the EXT3 (dir_index, noatime) with performance similar 
> to XFS.

Now that is very interesting.

>>>
>>> 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.
> Yes, the BBU is installed and write_cache is enable. I will test JFS to 
> compare.
> 
> Thanks for your help.

Please post your findings. :-)

Christopher