Re: ot: best filesystem for small files
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...
> i am going to be building 3 new mail servers using cyrus imap on debian
> 2.2 and linux 2.2. looks like cyrus stores each mail in a file which
> means the filesystem will have tens, or even hundreds of thousands of
> really small files.
>
> so, what is the best filesystem for something like this? or should i
> just tune ext2 to do the job.
reiserfs has been known to slaughter ext2 in this situation
> features beyond decent performance(same level as ext2 i hope) and
> being able to effectivly handle these files while running in software
> raid 1 are the most important.
Except that the reiserfs patches wreak havoc on Ingo Molnar's raid patches
(which are IMO needed to get any decent software raid setup working), or
they did the last time I tried them together (during the summer).
All that is moot if you use a hardware raid controller.
> journalling, and whatever other fancy shit is a nice plus but near the
> bottom of the list.
IMO the journaling capabilities of reiserfs are one of the biggest reasons
people use it :)
> i took a look at reiserfs's homepage but found little or no
> information that i found useful. specifically i'm lookin for a webpage
> or document that says something along the lines of "Why use XXX
> filesystem? because ..." or a site comparing filesystems, or an idea
> on what filesystem may be best.
I don't think there's been one available for 5-6 years (when ext2 won out
over xiafs and ext in the heards and minds of developers and users).
> i should note that i am not able/willing to upgrade to woody, and the
> same goes for linux 2.4.
woody isn't necessary
don't be so quick to rule out 2.4, though - test11 is working *really*
well for me in production environments (once I do stuff like "echo 0 >
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn" :)
> if it comes down to the wire i will just use ext2 and deal with
> whatever issues may comeup. i plan to have /var/spool/cyrus on it's
> own partition which may have the different filesystem, all other
> partitions will be ext2.
ext2 will serve you fine. Just be patient if you ever need to fsck the
filesystem.
I have >10000 messages in ~/Maildir (qmail's maildir format is very
similar to the mail folder format of cyrus, from what I hear) here on my
workstation, and the only performance problem I have is the fact that it's
on a 5400 RPM narrow Ultra-SCSI HD.
If you get *fast* drives (ie 10k or 15k RPM SCSI) you shouldn't have any
trouble.
BTW in such situations I find it's worthwhile to have a fair amount of
memory in the mail server - it helps performance *a lot* when you can
cache most (or all) of the mail boxes on the mail server in RAM.
- --
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Phil Brutsche pbrutsch@tux.creighton.edu
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