On Sat, 4 Nov 2006, David Carter wrote:
It's a easy (if inefficient) way to do horizontal scaling: you have several NFS backends and add more to get additional capacity without having to touch the existing systems.
This is what I call an "attractive nuisance"; it is an easy-to-deploy pseudo-solution, but is fundamentally wrong on an architectural level and has severe technical shortcomings.
A great deal of the effort is in educating people as to why the seemingly easy way is not the right way. Sadly, the lesson often does not sink in until after the site has invested a considerable amount of money in expensive hardware that does not solve their problems.
Joel Reicher's comments are completely correct; NFS and IMAP are both means for distributed access to storage, with NFS being for files and IMAP being for messages. When you use NFS as the file store for IMAP, you end up combining the disadvantages, and compromising/losing the advantages, of both.
-- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list [email protected] https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
