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
|