Re: Reducing disc contention

[A. Rothman]

Hi Pete,


Back when I was using Windows with the simple file-based configuration 
for James, I experienced a similar phenomenon - in particular, 
restarting the system would cause up to 10 full minutes of disk 
thrashing by James. While raw disk access, when done right, can be more 
efficient than a database (less overhead), it's apparently not that easy 
to get it done right. In all Windows versions I've used (dunno about 
recent offerings), for example, accessing a file within a directory with 
over 100k-300k files in it would be unusably slow. Although problems may 
also rise due to how James handles its files, serialization, caching, 
etc. Anyway, moving to a database mail store made the system usable 
again. Moving it (with the db) to Linux made it mostly unnoticeable. 
That's just a non-scientific personal anecdote, but I'd say moving to a 
database is sure worth a try - I used MySQL on both platforms with no 
special maintenance.


Hope this helps :-)


Amichai





Pete Williams wrote:

Hello

By quite hard on the disc, I mean that James uses it quite intensively. When 
James is running, other applications running on the server have their 
operations adversely affected. By running Filemon (part of Microsoft sys 
internals) I can see that the biggest user (in terms of open,read,write,close 
operations) of the disc is james.

Hence my looking for ways to make changes.


  
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:22:59 +0200
Subject: Re: Reducing disc contention
From: nor...@apache.org
To: server-user@james.apache.org

Hi Pete,

James will not store sent emails anywhere by itself. Anyway what you
mean with "quite hard on the disc" ? Does it use heavy I/O ? I don't
have any expierence in using JAMES on a Windows Server so I can't say
anything about tuning fs etc.

So maybe a DB would help...

Bye,
Norman


2009/10/21 Pete Williams <pxc...@hotmail.com>:
    
Hi

I'm a new James user,

James is working reliably but it seems to be quite hard on the disc, to the 
extent that it is affecting other applications.

I've read the mailing list and wondered what is the best way to go.

A few things that might help.

- I don't need the server to store sent emails. If this will help, how can I 
use config.xml to stop James storing these?

- Is adding a database into the equation  likely to help? I've had some 
difficulty trying to get the Microsoft JDBC driver working (it requires SSL on 
SQL server which I don't have). If this will reduce disc contention I can 
persevere with this, maybe trying another driver.

I have the following config.xml settings.

Max connections 2000
Timeout 200
Max threads 100
Min threads 20


There are something like 140 POP3 clients checking email every 90 seconds, and 
140 SMTP clients, each of which sends and email about once every 4 minutes.

Any help appreciated.

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