Re: Looking for guidance on filesystem tuning

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Nov 14, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Louis Guillaume wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm about to upgrade my mail server and I was looking for some 
> NetBSD-specific guidance wrt, primarily, the filesystem tuning. But any info 
> regarding kernel options to improve performance would be great too.
> 
> Here are the details:
> 
> o We will be using cyrus-imapd from pkgsrc.
> o The file system will be part of a RAIDFRAME-mirrored pair of
>   SCSI disks.
> o Many of the messages will contain large attachments.
> o The server hardware platform is i386.
> o We will be using regular builds of the netbsd-5 "stable"
>   branch.
> 
> The Tuning chapter in the NetBSD guide seems to need a fixup too; there is no 
> mention of WABPL, which appears to be the wave of the future (at least for 
> now).
> 
> Any guidance would be helpful, as well as any pointers towards good 
> documentation.
> 
I don't have specific suggestions on tuning, but you may want to say something 
about the expected load: number of users, number of messages/hour, etc.  How 
old or new is the platform?  Often, adding a lot more RAM is a very easy way to 
upgrade performance, but you can have a lot more RAM with amd64.

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb