Mount options for Optimizing ext2/ext3 performance with Maildir's
Hi
I have a mailserver with load average sitting somewhere between 1 and 2. It is
running exim serving a couple of thousand Maildir mailboxes and also has a
bunch of antivirus / antispam programs running on it. It has a pair of ide
hard drives running mirrored, raid1. I really do not want to start on reiser
or XFS. Reliability is my major concern and I do not think they are
warrented. But I would like to maximise my performance with the existing
ext2/ext3 partions.
Is ext3 faster or slower than ext2?
What mount options give the best performance, "noatime" "data=journal" ?
Currently I have everything in one big root partition. If I mount it with
"noatime" will a hole bunch of things stop working, like the automatic
reloading of files in /etc/cron.d/ ?
With the options data=journal / data=ordered / data=writeback which will give
me the best performance and which has the biggest chance of data loss in a
crash situation. I think I can live with mail that is being delivered at the
moment of a crash getting corrupted, provided that the server is never
rendered un-bootable and that no other files are effected.
At the moment the partitions are mounted ext2, although previously they were
mounted ext3. I have a kjournald process at the top of my "top" listing
(sorted by CPU usage). Is this actually stealing processing capacity from the
rest of the system?
The system is running with a 2.4.18. Is there anything to be gained from
upgrading to a later 2.4 or a 2.6 kernel.
My plan is to move the Maildirs and /var/spool/exim onto a separate partition
(there is an empty partition on the disk) mounted ext3 with "noatime" and
"data=journal". Maybe with a new kernel. Any suggestions?
Thanks
Ian
--
Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 21 683-1388 Fax: +27 21 674-1106
Snail Mail: P. O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
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