filesystem for mail

[Michael Hipp]

Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 16, 2006, Ben Duncan wrote:
>> Doing this very same thing now and it seems EXT3 is Just fine
>> for COurier IMAP ...
> 
> While ext3 is certainly OK, it may well require a time consuming
> fsck when the machine is rebooted.
> 
> We've been using XFS with courier-imap with more than 7,500 users
> at a fairly busy ISP site.  The /home file system on this machine
> has 2,620,609 inodes used out of 9,781,248 on an 80GB file system.
> 
> Performance isn't a problem either, processing about a half-million
> incoming messages a day, all deliveries being done by a cluster
> of servers with the user's home directories NFS mounted.

My servers are quite small so Bill's advice carries more weight than 
mine. But I've had too many problems with xfs to recommend it.

I started using xfs on all my servers about 2 years ago. During the 
following 1.5 years I had 3 cases where xfs became corrupt and the 
system failed. All 3 cases were ones of power outage where the UPS 
eventually cut off and the system didn't shut down clean. In 2 of the 3 
cases after a long afternoon of xfs_check and xfs_repair the system was 
back working fine. In the 3rd, the corruption was evidently too severe 
to be repairable and the system had to be rebuilt from scratch.

So from all that I concluded, facetiously, that xfs isn't really a 
journaled file system. What's the point of journaling if not to protect 
you from things like power failures.

I've never had these problems when using ext3. It's firmly in the "just 
works" column. Not flashy and probably not the best performer, but it works.

There's also the future promise of ext4 that may have led SUSE to move 
toward ext3 instead of something more sexy.

The long fsck's are annoying, but I don't reboot often so it doesn't 
seem like much of a consideration.

Michael