On 8 Feb 2012, at 20:19, Ori Bani wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to know if anyone here has any thoughts or opinions about the
best linux filesystem to use for an email system. There will be some
small amount of website data on the system (including webmail to read
the emails), although I could move that to another partition if need
be.
Anyone use ext4? Btrfs? Something else? Is ext3 fine even in high
volume email servers? Anyone use any non-default values for block size
or journaling type?
There could be different answers depending on your overall architecture
and usage patterns. A high delivery rate is a different thing than a
high user access rate, and high message count volume is a different
thing than high byte volume. It sounds like your user message store is
on the same system as your Postfix queues, and those may have differing
needs, depending on what kind of volume you have going through Postfix,
what message store server (IMAP/POP/webmail) you use and how it is
configured, what clients your users predominantly use, and so on.
I would stay away from btrfs until it is much more mature. As a general
rule (very general) mail systems stress allocation and metadata
efficiency more than sustained data flow, so you'd want to avoid options
like the older versions of XFS.
