From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Oct 17 15:07:47 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: stable@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 954A216A41F for ; Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:07:47 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from brad@stop.mail-abuse.org) Received: from vhost109.his.com (vhost109.his.com [216.194.225.101]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8DE6643D53 for ; Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:07:45 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from brad@stop.mail-abuse.org) Received: from [10.0.1.210] (localhost.his.com [127.0.0.1]) by vhost109.his.com (8.12.11/8.12.3) with ESMTP id j9HF7U5H015013; Mon, 17 Oct 2005 11:07:38 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from brad@stop.mail-abuse.org) Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <0E972CEE334BFE4291CD07E056C76ED807738007@bragi.housing.ufl.edu> References: <0E972CEE334BFE4291CD07E056C76ED807738007@bragi.housing.ufl.edu> Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 17:03:56 +0200 To: "Will Saxon" From: Brad Knowles Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Cc: stable@freebsd.org, Ronald Klop Subject: RE: Disk 100% busy X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:07:47 -0000 At 1:53 PM -0400 2005-10-16, Will Saxon wrote: > I completely forgot that I had the partition mounted 'sync'. That might > explain things a bit, huh. Perhaps. > I am using qmail - the author indicates that softupdates is not > recommended. However, I am going to give it a shot and see if I start > losing mail as he suggests may happen. Soft Updates is only guaranteed to keep your filesystem in a consistent state, and does not guarantee that you won't lose a few messages. There are MTAs designed for use on filesystems that use Soft Updates, but I don't think qmail is one of them. Moreover, qmail was not designed for scalability when handling lots of back-end processes such as anti-spam/anti-virus scanning, and I believe that it tends to perform badly in those roles. You can configure either postfix or sendmail to be considerably more scalable in those kinds of situations than qmail. Indeed, with a little careful configuration, with sendmail you can avoid virtually all synchronous meta-data updates as far as the daemon itself is concerned, and when combined with milter-savvy scanning programs, you can pretty much completely avoid them all the way up to the point where you have to make final delivery to a user mailbox. That makes for a much more scalable mail system than qmail is capable of. But then, I'm probably a bit biased since I gave what I believe were the first public talks on the subject of building scalable mail systems involving such features (see and ). -- Brad Knowles, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See for more info.