On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 21:28 -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday, May 29 at 09:46 AM, quoth Curtis Maloney:
> > This is certainly one advantage dbox and maildir have -- not being
> > limited to the FS file size limit per folder.
>
> That's not *entirely* accurate. Certainly no single message can exceed
> the 2GB limit even with maildir, and the other issue that begins to
> come up is the impact/effect of large numbers of files. Depending on
> the filesystem (I'm assuming ext2?), there's probably a hard limit on
FC4 had ext3 (unless my memory is totally mistaken).
> the number of files per directory, and almost certainly there's a big
Subdirectories, yes (because the link count in the inode is of quite
finite size).
But there never was TTBOMK a limit on the number of files (!=
Directories) in ext2 (except the trivial one: The directory is as large
as the largest file. But that applies probably to all filesystems -
though more recent ones allow for much larger files).
Let alone ext3.
> performance penalty for that many files. To get good performance with
> Maildir and really large folders, you need a filesystem that can
> handle large numbersof files. Ext3 has directory hashing, ReiserFS is
Make sure you have the "dir_index" option set on that filesystem (which
is probably set per default anyways these days. Otherwise you can change
it on the fly with `tune2fs`).
The back of my head suggests that one has to recreate the directory
after changing that option (read: `mkdir new; mv old/* new; rmdir old;
mv new old`. Solving the "command line too long" problem is left to the
reader;-).
> good... I believe XFS and several others have tackled the problem as
> well (I don't know about FFS).
>
> That said... eGADS - a real life FC4 in the wild?!?! According to
> fedoraproject.org:
>
> For 20030101-20050607 there are a potential 863 CVE named
> vulnerabilities that could have affected FC4 packages. 759 (88%)
> of those are fixed because FC4 includes an upstream version that
> includes a fix, 10 (1%) are still outstanding, and 94 (11%) are
> fixed with a backported patch.
>
> That would make me a little nervous.... that's just the issues over
> the course of two years, ending in 2005 (FOUR years ago).
I don't know what/how others do but many servers are not really "in the
wild" but behind more recent firewalls and/or loadbalancers and/or
similar equipment (like running database servers behind webservers).
And "running FC4" doesn't mean that that certain/some/several/many
packages aren't replaced by more recent ones - for whatever reason
(security, performance, newer version, newer drivers in the
kernel, ...).
For a "pristine FC4 with lots of services directly at the Internet": I
totally agree with you.
Apart from the basic question if one shouldn't better run a more
conservative distribution (like RHEL) in the first place where the
support cycle is much longer.
Bernd
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