Re: xfs on compaq

[Jim Eshleman <jce0@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jean,

  We are successfully? running XFS on our production mail server (an 
8-way PIII-Xeon with 8.5G memory) with about 10000 accounts (mailboxes) 
and about 1500 processes under peak load.  We run secure POP and IMAP, 
sendmail, open LDAP, kernel NFSD, NIS.  I think our problems are related 
to HIGHMEM, i.e. greater than 2G or so.  I've not been able to reproduce 
the problems on a test box with 1G of memory.

  We are using XFS and quotas on /home (about 150G hardware RAID1E) and 
on /var/spool/mail (50G hardware RAID1E) while other filesystems are ext2.

  Linux 2.4.9 + linux-2.4.14-xfs-2001-11-06.patch had been running for 
about a week between failures.  We've reduced I/O load by moving around 
disks and files and so far (4 days) the system seems to handle the load 
much better so perhaps it will not fail or time between failures will be 
longer.  I am also expecting an additional 4G of memory for our test box 
so I can hopefully recreate the problems with 2.4.14 there and get some 
useful debugging info.

  I would say if you can get by with 2G or less of memory then Linux 
2.4 and XFS (or EXT3 or maybe reiserfs) might be a good solution.  If 
you'll need HIGHMEM support you may want to wait...  Note that on the 
mailing lists you generally see only the problem reports, and not the 
success stories.  Your best bet is to test it yourself as best you can.

  Good luck!

Jim