Re: File system of choice?

On Thu, 13 May 2010, Yiorgos Adamopoulos wrote:

> We manage ~100K mailboxes which will be migrated on new servers. The
> mailbox format is mbx (expetced to change to mix after the migration)
> and the Operating System will be Linux amd64. So, on what filesystem
> would one place them?  Currently we are thinking of putting them on
> XFS.
>
> PS: We do not deliver "flat" under /var/mail; we use a two level
> hashing scheme based on the user ID.

FWIW
We manage ~5K mailboxes on one machine, but with fair activity
(500~1000) simultaneous users. We ran on HP-UX for years (JFS on LVM)
but recently switched to SuSE Linux (on a VM). We found that XFS on LVM
most closely matched our expectations.
We run a local customized version of "blackbox" mode, all user
interaction with mailboxes is via imap/pop, so no direct user access
to the filesystem.
We used mbx for years but switched to mix once it was pretty stable
and haven't looked back (when you have a user who likes to have 30K
messages in his 6GB INBOX, mix is a necessity. With mbx the backups
were killing us. ;).