[ILUG] 2 quick mail questions.

[Niall O Broin]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 11:01:56AM +0000, Padraig Brady wrote:

> This is a file system issue, which isn't an issue in reiser
> as anything that isn't an integer block size is packed directly
> into the reiser structures. This is really cool for small mails
> as they wont take any disk blocks at all.

This is touted as an advantage of Reiser BUT it's not quite as good as it's
painted. I moved something south of a gig of data a while ago from an old
disk which was ext2 with 1K blocksize to Reiser - the Reiser filesystem was
a little bigger.

> So if you want to make a nice big scalable mail server, store the
> mails on reiser in maildir format. There is a problem however, reiser
> is not 100% stable yet, especially over NFS.

There are patches for this, and SuSE has had them integrated for a while.
Mind you, I'm right now doing some indexing of ~ 100K files on an 80GB
Reiser FS. The FS is on box A and the indexing is happening on box B which
has the FS mounted over NFS (knfsd running on box B). It is bloody slow, and
I don't know whether to blame that on NFS, or Reiser, or the Perl find
module. I suspect Perl somehow, because a simple find (which is essentially
all I'm doing) on the NFS mounted filesystem seems to go much faster.


Regards,


Niall