Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 09:33:41 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <jeremyp@gsmx07.alcatel.com.au> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: rfg@monkeys.com Subject: Re: tmpfs .. ? Message-ID: <99Dec6.092620est.40335@border.alcanet.com.au>
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On Sat, 04 Dec 1999 15:44:49 -0800, "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> wrote: >Specifically, I'm planning a large mail server... which will use Sendmail... >and I'd really like to allocate the Sendmail queue files... which typically >have a rather short lifespan... on/in some sort of filesystem (e.g. an >mfs or else this VN thing you are talking about) that would tend to give >petter performance than just using an ordinary disk-based filesystem. This doesn't sound like a good application for a temporary filesystem. Whilst the files do typically have a short lifetime, and there are lots of them, they represent mail items which your server has accepted responsibility for delivering. Also, the queue files can potentially exist for several days (the default timeout is 5 days). I would suggest that UFS with softupdates represents a better performance/ reliability tradeoff than MFS or a swap-backed vnode. The main problem is that sendmail places all queue files (and there are several for each undelivered message) in one directory - and very large directories are not handled particularly efficently by UFS. The simple solutions are: 1) switch to an alternative MTA that doesn't display this behaviour. 2) hack sendmail to have multiple subdirectories within the main queue directory - with the subdirectory chosen by hashing the sendmail job id. Peter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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