On Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 11:02:24AM -0400, B.C.J.O wrote:
> and into the user homedirectory, as it should be. =) And secondly, given
> the lockless operation, they are much much more reliable on large
> mailcluster setups where you throw the spools/homedirs into Network Attached
> Storage like that offered by Netap or EMC. This lockless operation gives
Especially given that Linux doesn't support NFS locking. It's hard
enough to get locking right on the same box, never mind trying to make
it work over a network. MTA authors will tend to tell you that they
don't guarantee things working over even the best NFS implementations.
> agent reads, etc. (as I understand it). FWIW, my mail setup eats a pile
> less cpu and IO on my shell server since moving from sendmail to
> qmail+maildirs.
Maildir can reduce the amount of I/O needed to scan a mailbox in some
fairly common situations. The tradeoff is between the effort required
to open every file in a directory and the effort required to scan every
line in the mailbox.
One problem you can encounter is that many filesystems (including ext2)
scale very poorly when you get very large numbers of files in a
directory.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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