Scalable Mail solution with NAS

Wed Jan 31 21:06:00 UTC 2001

> > But, with 200k mailboxes, you should have an automated way to do that anyway.
> 
> Hah. Unlink the directory, and do a background fsck every few hours? :)

I don't know why you'd want to do the above, but you could add code
to the deliver agents; When inbound email hits the system: create
the require directories and files if required, this could be
mail.local, deliver or something similar.  When mailbox is emptied
get the delivery agent [could be pop3d or imapd] to delete any
empty directories, then growing directories can be kept under
control.

> 
> The trouble with the above format is that you're ignoring any locality
> that exists in the filesystem. For example, in Berkeley FFS, files in
> a given directory are allocated in the same cylinder group (or at least
> it is attempted..)
> 
> Which, under heavy heavy load could actually give a slight performance
> boost on a non-filled FFS.

Agreed, but depending on the scale you'd most likely want logging file
systems otherwise reboots could be painful.

Regards,
Neil.