On 10/9/2011 3:29 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote: > I'm honestly more interested in maildir type workload too, spool doesn't > get enough traffic usually to care about IO. > > (sorry, getting a bit off topic for the postfix list)
Maybe not off topic. You're delivering into the maildir mailboxes with local(8) right? > We went with lots of small filesystems to reduce single points of > failure rather than one giant filesystem across all our spools. Not a bad architecture. Has a few downsides but one big upside. Did you really mean Postfix spools here, or did you mean to say maildir directories? > No, not really. I'm not going to advise people to use something that > requires a lot of tuning. My point was that if a workload requires, or can benefit from XFS, it requires a learning curve, and is worth the effort. > My goodness. That's REALLY recent in filesystem times. Something XFS has been seeing substantial development for a few years now due to interest from RedHat, who plan to make it the default RHEL filesystem in the future. They've dedicated serious resources to the effort, including hiring Dave Chinner from SGI. Dave's major contribution while at RedHat has been the code that yields the 10X+ increase in unlink performance. It is enabled by default in 2.6.39 and later kernels. > that recent plus "all my eggs in one basket" of changing to a > large multi-spindle filesystem that would really get the benefits > of XFS would be more dangerous than I'm willing to consider. That's That's one opinion, probably not shared by most XFS users. I assume your current architecture is designed to mitigate hardware failure--focused on the very rare occasion of filesystem corruption in absence of some hardware failure event. I'd make an educated guess that the median size XFS filesystem in the wild today is at least 50TB and spans dozens of spindles housed in multiple FC SAN array chassis. > barely a year old. At least we're not still running Debian's 2.6.32 > any more, but still. We've been discussing a performance patch to a filesystem driver, not a Gnome release. :) Age is irrelevant. It's the mainline default. If you have an "age" hangup WRT kernel patches, well that's just silly. > I'll run up some tests again some time, but I'm not thinking of > switching soon. Don't migrate just to migrate. If you currently have deficient performance with high mailbox concurrency on many spindles, it may make sense. If youre performance is fine, and you have plenty of headroom, stick with what you have. I evangelize XFS to the masses because it's great for many things, and many people haven't heard of it, or know nothing about it. They simply use EXTx because it's the default. I'm getting to the word out WRT possibilities and capabilities. I'm not trying to _convert_ everyone to XFS. Apologies to *BSD, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX mail server admins if it appears I assume the world is all Linux. I don't assume that--all the numbers out here say it has ~99% of all "UNIX like" server installs. -- Stan
