Hi Andrew, I have been using maildir on reiserfs for at least a year and am quite happy with it. Reiserfs doesn't use i-nodes in the sense that it's not a limited resource like it is for more traditional *nix file systems. It does however provide unique i-nodes for backwards compatibility.
When I was evaluating a suitable file system for our imap mail server, two things mattered the most to me; Journaling (for fast recovery) and performance. At the time, reiserfs seemed to be the only journaling fs on Linux that people were using in production. So I started to use it. One nice feature of reiserfs is that file space allocation is variable and not restrained to any particular block size. If you store huge amount of small sized files, like a message store or a net news database, reiserfs can save you a lot of disk space. There are also negative effects with this, like if you constantly modify lots of small files, it need to reallocate the files every time, which substantially affect the performance. This is however not usually the case with message stores. One problem I've experienced with reiserfs is an incompatibility between reiserfs modules in Linux kernel 2.2 and 2.4. Backward compatibility was something I took for granted, and it gave me a great deal of trouble when I changed from 2.2 to 2.4. This would not have happened with ext2. I currently run a maildir message store with a total size of 12 GB and 200k of messages. Here's the file size distribution: less than 1K : 7% between 1K and 2K : 26% between 2K and 4K : 29% between 4K and 1M : 37% more than 1M : 1% Maildir have never caused any problems for me. So if you find a reliable file system, you're home. Since the price of diskspace is such a bargain these days, I may have been choosing ext3 if I were doing the evaluation today. With a reservation for it's performance, that is. Regards, Tomas Andrew Newton wrote: > I'm setting up Courier on a new box (complete fresh install of OS) and > was wondering which filesystems would be best to use. I hadn't really > thought about the issue much until a co-worker mentioned it. I was > gonna use reiserfs because I read somewhere that it didn't really use > i-nodes, which I perceive might be a problem to a mail system that uses > Maildir format (lots of small files, just the potential for running out > of i-nodes). > > But are there any other issues I need to consider, like synchronicity > and atomicity of mail delivery? > > -andy > > > _______________________________________________ > courier-users mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
