Steven Bellovin wrote:
On Nov 14, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Louis Guillaume wrote:
I'm about to upgrade my mail server and I was looking for some NetBSD-specific guidance wrt, primarily, the filesystem tuning.
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.
We're talking small-potatoes here :) Maximum 50 users, light load: about 30 messages delivered to local inboxes each hour.
I've been running on older hardware for a long time and will continue to do so for a while as I don't think I'm maxing out what I have so far: Dual PIII 1GHz, SCSI disks mirrored w/ RaidFrame RAID1.
But what I'm really trying to get at is any file-system performance tweaks that would help in this situation and that would perhaps apply to more general, higher-volume situations too.
Most likely it won't make a difference for me. But what's the "Right Thing to Do" for an FFS file-system that has Cyrus-IMAP data on it? i.e. many many small files and many many writes.
Clearly more RAM is good (and I will likely do that). Also Jean-Yves sent along a good link on VM tuning that I'll take into consideration.
But is there anything file-system specific? Block-size? journaling? that I should be caring about?
Thanks for looking. Louis