Filesystem tuning for lots of small files (a Maildir)?

[Darren Pilgrim]

I'm currently facing a problem of having used Netscape (now Mozilla) for
years in Windows and now trying to find something I can regularly use in
FreeBSD without losing Mozilla in Windows.

I've mostly settled on IMAP (courier) with procmail filters, but that raises the issue of filesystem performance for directories with large numbers of files/subdirectories in them. I have more than 32,000 emails stored. How do I calculate/see the number of available inodes? The existing filesystem was newfs'd with the sysinstall defaults. Should I re-newfs it with different values? What would I want to set them at? I know I'd need to adjust things to make sure I have enough inodes for 40,000+ files, but what about the block and fragment size? Should I use smaller values like 8192/1024 or 4096/512 or is the default 16384/2048 best? Higher values would just increase slack space, right? What are the impacts of lower values?

Some folders, like the one for the postfix-users list, can have 3000-4000 messages in them. For growth, we'll say 5000 messages. The IMAP layout with Courier means all the folders sit all on one level under ~/Maildir, which means I'd have 200 or so subdirectories in one place. I have the UFS_DIRHASH option enabled for the my MP3 collection, but that's as case of 300 subdirecories in one directory, not 5000 files. What else can I do to tune for this kind of (ab)use?

P.S. I really would like to stick with Maildirs and Courier-IMAP for this. I know CIMAP well and it has proven very fast and stable for what I do with it. However, if these demands are just too much to expect from an IMAP-accessed Maildir, Courier, or FreeBSD, what are my alternatives?



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