On Saturday, October 7, 2017 11:18:33 AM CEST Tanstaafl wrote: > On 10/6/2017, 8:53:27 AM, Philip Webb <purs...@ca.inter.net> wrote: > > 171005 christos kotsis wrote: > >> I just noticed that ReiserFS has significant performance > >> over ext3, 4 when dealing with small files. > > > > I've long relied on ReiserFS for everything except /boot > > & have never had any problems with my files or drives. > > I have many small files + a few big PDFs -- perhaps c 20 MB ea -- > > & the big ones simply stay where I put them, so no changes to handle. > > I used ReiserFS for many - 8+ - years on our old mail server, selected > for its performance with large numbers of small (maildir) files, and > never had a problem.
Same here, apart from that one partition where the fsck never worked. > But during the last rebuild when virtualizing everything, sometime > around 2012, I switched to XFS, and believe I saw a performance gain, > and no more long fsck's during the rare reboots... and again, no problems. My last rebuild was earlier this year, my mail had already been migrated to ext4 without issues. (Did not notice any performance issues) > Personally, I can't wait until btrfs is fully ready/stable, and have > been considering FreeBSD (or FreeNAS) just for ZFS, for the reliability > factor, but have wondered about performance for mail servers. > > Anyone have any experience with comparing performance with either btrfs > or ZFS against either ReiserFS or XFS for a maildir based mail server? My mailserver (Cyrus) uses ext4 for the mailboxes. This is on a partition which is accessed via iSCSI. Which is a zvol on a ZFS pool. Eg: disks <-> ZFS <-> zvol <-> iSCSI <-> ext4 I am not noticing any significant performance issues, the ones I am can be resolved by adding a dedicated SLOG en L2ARC, but this will only help the systems hanging in the rack as those are connected with a 20Gbe link. Rest of the systems won't get more than 1Gbe. I have several large mailboxes: - postgresql-hackers = 195,000 items - gentoo-user = 240,000 items - Xen-devel = 366,000 items The others are below 100,000. I use these as archives and regularly search through these before reverting to Google or asking on the relevant mailing lists. > Although, I will also be switching to dovecot's mdbox format when I set > up my next server, so the issue of lots of small files won't be nearly > as big. mdbox? Is this a single file per mail folder? The main reason I switched to maildir several decades ago was precisely the issues (by design) mbox has. A single corrupted email WILL kill the entire folder. -- Joost
