From: Angelos Karageorgiou (angelosunix.gr)
Date: Mon Jul 23 2007 - 03:05:48 CDT

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After 600 odd servers with 98% ext3 it seems to me to be the most
balanced solution with regards to stability/performance, I have had
kernel crashes in the ext3FS namespace but all of them were recoverable !

And as far as NFS performance in concerned , never underappreciate the
storage server's cache memory for the FS !!! \
Why avoid raid5 ? It is great for reads , and most of the time an email
server does reads. My favorite way of setting Mail systems is via MX
servers with the queues on local disks and the maildirs on NFS mounted
partitions, Best of both worlds.I Use Raid5 with hot spares on the NFS
server. Mirrored disks on the MXs

O/H Julian Cowley Ýãñáøå:
> On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Patrick - South Valley Internet wrote:
>> I am in the process of building a load balanced e-mail server that
>> mounts the Mail Spool and /home directories via NFS from a dedicated
>> NFS server. I've been reading a lot of information about certain
>> filesystems and Postfix, but nothing I read is in regards to what
>> filesystem to use when using NFS to mount the filesystem.
>>
>> So far it looks like XFS and ext3 are the two choices I've seen
>> recommended. Currently I installed Ubuntu 6.06LTS onto the NFS server
>> just so I can easily test out XFS. I've seen some bonnie++ results
>> such as:
>>
>> http://adria.fesb.hr/~jsosic/mojbench.html
>>
>> Which state XFS is a good filesystem to use. This however does not
>> talk about it being used with Postfix and Dovecot.
>
> Filesystem performance between ext3 and XFS was recently discussed
> on the Linux RAID mailing list. See this thread:
>
> http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2007-07/msg00144.html
>
> The skinny seems to be that XFS performs better (but that may be due
> to journalling schemes). Personally, I've had an XFS filesystem go
> south after a hard drive with bad sectors failed (data recoverable,
> but not metadata such file names), so I lean towards using ext3.
> Both filesystems are considered mature.
>
> For performance, you probably want RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 (avoid RAID 5
> since writes are more expensive). Also, you may want to avoid using
> volume managers such as LVM since the added abstraction can slow down
> performance.

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