> I think that this is partly because ext3 does more aggressive read ahead > (which would be a mixed blessing under heavy load), partly because > reiserfs suffers from fragmentation. I imagine that there is probably a > tipping point under the sort of very heavy load that Fastmail see.
I second that - reiserfs seems to be truly horrible in write-heavy situations. Worse, a backup of our remaining reiserfs partition takes *days* to complete -- 165GB at ~500k/s. And this is a 32-disk stripe of fibre channel. Then you see things like this: http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/ ...And you suddenly have an explanation for its performance issues. For us, mail delivery is the worst part. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but moving the three db's (mailboxes, quotas, delivery) to another disk (on ext3) has greatly improved performance. reiserfs' recovery tools are awful -- I watched this filesystem "fsck" over an entire weekend recently with all kinds of nasty warnings. It seems reiserfs (v3 at least) is a dead product, too. I still have concerns that moving this remaining reiserfs partition to ext3 will make matters worse, but I have nothing else to go on. John -- John Madden Sr. UNIX Systems Engineer Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
