Hi I have a mailserver with load average sitting somewhere between 1 and 2. It is running exim serving a couple of thousand Maildir mailboxes and also has a bunch of antivirus / antispam programs running on it. It has a pair of ide hard drives running mirrored, raid1. I really do not want to start on reiser or XFS. Reliability is my major concern and I do not think they are warrented. But I would like to maximise my performance with the existing ext2/ext3 partions.
Is ext3 faster or slower than ext2? What mount options give the best performance, "noatime" "data=journal" ? Currently I have everything in one big root partition. If I mount it with "noatime" will a hole bunch of things stop working, like the automatic reloading of files in /etc/cron.d/ ? With the options data=journal / data=ordered / data=writeback which will give me the best performance and which has the biggest chance of data loss in a crash situation. I think I can live with mail that is being delivered at the moment of a crash getting corrupted, provided that the server is never rendered un-bootable and that no other files are effected. At the moment the partitions are mounted ext2, although previously they were mounted ext3. I have a kjournald process at the top of my "top" listing (sorted by CPU usage). Is this actually stealing processing capacity from the rest of the system? The system is running with a 2.4.18. Is there anything to be gained from upgrading to a later 2.4 or a 2.6 kernel. My plan is to move the Maildirs and /var/spool/exim onto a separate partition (there is an empty partition on the disk) mounted ext3 with "noatime" and "data=journal". Maybe with a new kernel. Any suggestions? Thanks Ian -- Ian Forbes ZSD http://www.zsd.co.za Office: +27 21 683-1388 Fax: +27 21 674-1106 Snail Mail: P. O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]