I dont want to start a religious battle, but could I have some opinions on filesystems for a 100ish user imap server? I have 2x 250G western digital disks to use.
I think the performance of those disks (and the RAID you put on them) will be much more significant that the filesystem you use, considering the size of your user population. And given that factor, I'd say that even ext3 won't give you any problems performance-wise. Still, reiserfs, IMO, would be preferable for mail files.
The problems you run into when using ext3 depend less on how many users you have than how many messages those users put into individual folders. Even with 100 users, if they are heavy users, you can have noticable slowdowns if many of them keep more than 5000 messages in their INBOX. Using a filesystem without indexes means each fs access will run a linear scan through the list of files in the directory. Of course, having more users compounds the problem.
I agree with the RAID-1 suggestion. At least use the md driver to run a mirror. I did this on an old box a while back, mirrored two IDE drives using Linux's software RAID, for a box with over 100 users, and it worked well.
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