Short version:

Q: can /var/qmail/queue live on a separate disk partition than 
the rest of /var/qmail/* files?

Long version:

Does anyone have any reason to believe that you cannot put the
queue on it's own mount point?  Either a sym link from /var/qmail/queue
--> to another disk pack or simply making  /var/qmail/queue a mount
point from a different disk.  Are there any dependencies that force all
of /var/qmail/* to reside on the same disk (e.g. inode numbering
issues)?  My belief is that only /var/qmail/queue has issues with the
inode filenames.


Why:

We attempted to do this on a two new qmail server machines (SPARC Ultra IIs 
running Solaris 2.6 with QMAIL+LDAP), and after a couple of days
started to notice some performance degradation, and also that the
number of non preprocessed messages in the queue started getting very
large (thousands after a while) and the email delivery rate came to a
crawl.  This was not happening on any of the otherwise identical
machines (8 of them) except that those had all of /var/qmail on the same disk.

Unfortunately, didn't get enough time to really try to troubleshoot
this problem before we were forced into reconfiguring the two
problematic machines.  The problem went away after we moved the queues
back onto the same disk and now has been working fine for several days
in the same environment (i.e. nothing else was changed).

Can anyone think of why this problem would have occurred?  I'm
suspecting it was something completely unrelated to the QMAIL software,
either an OS issue or maybe even some SCSI problems (although no
hardware errors were ever recorded).

We're hesitant to try this again as it only appears after some period of
time and seems to be load related.

Thanks,

--curtis

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