Re: Looking for guidance on filesystem tuning

["Aaron J. Grier" <agrier%poofygoof.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 04:08:05PM -0500, Louis Guillaume wrote:
> 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.

I ran site-wide mail (including mailing lists) for a number of years
with ~20 users on a single CPU PIII-450 with 384MB of RAM and a mirrored
(raidframe) message store for a number of years under NetBSD 1.5 / 1.6.
software was courier IMAP, stock postfix, and a bastard mix of maildrop,
postfix, and spamassassin.  list software was mailman.  the obligatory
web interface was provided by apache 1.3 and squirrelmail.

RAM was the biggest limitation with my setup (the motherboard was
ancient and couldn't support any more than 384MB), but I was able to
tune down the number of simultaneous deliveries and trade speed for
latency.  IMAP for a lot of the users was faster than local store.

I suspect if your setup is projected to be disk bound, you will get the
most bang for your buck fiddling with the RAIDFrame block sizes.  (ISTR
the limit of 128 gave the best performance for me, but that was years
ago.)

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | 
agrier%poofygoof.com@localhost