Thank you for the reply and sorry for the delay in responding. >> I'd like to know if anyone here has any thoughts or opinions about the >> best linux filesystem to use for an email system. There will be some >> small amount of website data on the system (including webmail to read >> the emails), although I could move that to another partition if need >> be. >> >> Anyone use ext4? Btrfs? Something else? Is ext3 fine even in high >> volume email servers? Anyone use any non-default values for block size >> or journaling type? > > There could be different answers depending on your overall architecture and > usage patterns. A high delivery rate is a different thing than a high user > access rate, and high message count volume is a different thing than high > byte volume.
Right, and I'm sorry for being a little vague. I was in part hoping not to limit my responses and am interested in feedback from people experienced in different environments. For my situation, I'm not unhappy with ext3, but don't currently support the volume I used to or plan to support. I once had a very bad experience with ReiserFS in a high-volume email setup, but I think ext4 or possibly XFS could add a nice performance boost, but that's only from doing some light reading. > It sounds like your user message store is on the same system as > your Postfix queues, and those may have differing needs, depending on what > kind of volume you have going through I currently have the luxury of being able to put them on different partitions if necessary. I did consider that, but I didn't include it in my original question. If you can make any suggestions about the file systems and/or attributes/configuration of them that work better and worse for the queues versus maildirs, then PLEASE tell me what you can offer! > Postfix, what message store server > (IMAP/POP/webmail) you use and how it is configured, what clients your users > predominantly use, and so on. As I said, I was hoping for general feedback from a variety of administrators and I'm sorry if that should have been stated or is just too vague. If you simply can't answer without knowing more about my environment, it's a mix of both casual users and small/medium business users; the volume isn't very very high for any one user (but as more users are added overall volume will go up), and message sizing is generally not obscenely large - mostly your average text and html messages, but there are also those few media files and other 10 or 20MB messages that aren't entirely uncommon. Access is primarily via IMAP using either webmail or desktop client. > I would stay away from btrfs until it is much more mature. As a general rule > (very general) mail systems stress allocation and metadata efficiency more > than sustained data flow, so you'd want to avoid options like the older > versions of XFS. I named btrfs when I really should have asked about XFS. Thanks for the tip.
