[CentOS] Filesystem for Maildir

Christopher Chan christopher at ias.com.hk
Thu Nov 29 02:35:27 UTC 2007


Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2007, Christopher Chan wrote:
>>>> What does fsbench say? It has the best writing performance too?!?
>>>>
>>> No, according to the fsbench results, ReiserFS wins on Read Performance, 
>>> but XFS is, approximately, four times more faster on write.
>>>
>>> I said that the ReiserFS have the best performance based on my 
>>> read/write server statics, where read requests are 70% of total I/O 
>>> requests.
>> Ah. Too bad reiserfs is not stable enough for you.
> 
> I've lost several file systems to reiserfs, originally figuring that they
> were safe since SuSE has used them as their default for years.

The thing is, people swear by reiserfs. They probably used it after 
2.4.18 after the vfs layer in the linux kernel stabilized.

> 
> We're using ext3 now as it appears to be rock-solid, is supported out of
> the box by every Linux I've used, and I've never lost one.

Well I have. No, I do not intend to use anything other than ext3 as it 
is still the most stable of the lot unfortunately.

> 
> We haven't had any notable performance problems using this at a regional
> ISP customer's site with about 10,000 e-mail users and several machines in
> a cluster delivering mail to Maildir folders that are NFS mounted to the
> central server.
> 

I did a lot of tweaking to get the best out of ext3, xfs and Linux when 
I worked for an email service provider that handled 30 million mailboxes 
and had hundreds of machines but that was on mta machines. ext3 was not 
used for maildir until a few years after I started working there 
presumably after I demonstrated that Linux and ext3/xfs have acceptable 
stability. When I started, most machines were running FreeBSD including 
the mta ones where my primary responsibilities laid.

ext3 is (was with Centos5?) the slowest of all filesystems available for 
Linux.



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