From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jun 18 10:35:16 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 183CD37B401 for ; Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:35:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out003.verizon.net (out003pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.103]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2256E43F3F for ; Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:35:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([141.149.47.46]) by out003.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.33 201-253-122-126-133-20030313) with ESMTP id <20030618173514.YZXX4805.out003.verizon.net@mac.com>; Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:35:14 -0500 Message-ID: <3EF0A2D2.2070508@mac.com> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:35:14 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Forrest Aldrich References: <5.2.1.1.2.20030618121909.03c44748@192.168.1.1> In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.2.20030618121909.03c44748@192.168.1.1> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.76.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out003.verizon.net from [141.149.47.46] at Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:35:14 -0500 cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: mfs/ramdisk performance issues X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 17:35:16 -0000 Forrest Aldrich wrote: [ ... ] > In a mail gateway configuration, several people have suggested that > using a tmpfs (or mfs, depending upon your flavor of Unix) would provide > a performance increase (i/o). Though someone argued (on a list > posting) that the buffering on normal disk operation would probably be > better. I'm not sure about "better", but certainly "safer". What happens to spooled mail on a tmpfs/mfs filesystem when the system goes down? Anyway, most mail servers are limited by network bandwidth, not by local I/O performance. If you're not talking about hundreds of thousands of messages per day, you probably don't need to worry about performance tuning this aspect. -- -Chuck