On 14/11/2021 14:14, infoomatic wrote:
My setups are nothing special with few users, however, I would like to
have a nice setup, maybe some of you could contribute to this thread. We
are using slow spinning disks, but we may consider using ssds in a
not-so-distant future.
*) storages: any infos on ZFS options or whether to use mdbox or sdbox,
and what configs/options regarding compression etc.
OmniOS with ZFS here.
I use maildir - just a personal choice and inertia, I have no
performance data, no problem and no reason to change. I like being able
to see emails as plain files.
zfs set compress=gzip
and no other changes from default, oh and atime=off on the whole
machine. Email gzips well, most other ZFSes I leave on lz4. I say it
is better to use the file system to compress rather than getting dovecot
to do it.
$ zfs get compress,compressratio,used ...
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
...../..../vmail compression gzip received
...../..../vmail compressratio 1.82x -
...../..../vmail used 8.55G -
25 mailbox users ("nothing special with few users").
I moved the storage from HDD (mirror plus log) to SSD (mirror) and no
one noticed, not even me knowing it had been done and over a local
network. I have enough RAM such that repeated reads are cached.
I will use native ZFS encryption soon. I see no performance issues in test.
Don't get hung up on ZFS tuning, mostly ZFS just works.
*) backup: what is a best practice regarding backups? - using only the
dovecot tools or leveraging the great features of ZFS (or both) with
snapshots etc.?
I use automated snapshots and zfs send/receive to a remote backup
machine. I auto copy many ZFSes this way so it is minimal effort to do
email too.
James
