On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 10:32:23AM -0600, Jeff Hayward wrote:
> On 14 Jan 2000, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> I'm responding to provide a counterpoint to Russ's views. I certainly
> don't plan on changing his mind by my argument. It is abundantly clear
> that "there's more that one way to do it (well)" to borrow a phrase.
>
> My experience is quite the contrary, namely that delivering to *any*
> shared file system, whether it be NFS or AFS, is fundamentally less
> reliable and harder to maintain than delivering mail to independent mail
> server machines [...]
>
> It is funny how one's experiences can be different. At my site, it is
> exactly the opposite. The minute we changed from a "user dictates server"
> correspondence to a separation of the data from the application we saw
> enormous improvement in reliability and ease of maintenance. We serve
> about 80K users using layer 4 redirectors, 10 application server boxes and
> 2 NFS servers. There is virtually no maintenance, no outages, and no
> performance peaks and valleys. By putting our money in to making the data
> reliable we don't have to have expensive and complicated schemes to keep
> application servers up. Load balancing happens automatically, not by
> adding/moving users to application boxes. Failover is just a special case
> of load balancing. Scales well for us (about 6.5 million messages stored
> in maildirs) with no limits on the horizon.
>
> That said, maildir indexing would help latency in application response
> quite a bit.
>
> Oh, we've also been down the AFS path. Not recommended based on my
> experience.
>
> Regards,
> -- Jeff Hayward
In the near future I will try out to store the users mail on one or
several CODA server(s). Have anyone any comment on that?
Best regards
Michael Boman
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