Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 13:02:08 -0500 From: "Craig Reyenga" <creyenga@connectmail.carleton.ca> To: "Darren Pilgrim" <dmp@pantherdragon.org> Cc: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Filesystem tuning for lots of small files (a Maildir)? Message-ID: <003b01c2c3d2$b65382f0$0200000a@sewer.org> References: <3E312DCE.8010607@pantherdragon.org>
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Pilgrim" <dmp@pantherdragon.org>
To: <questions@freebsd.org>
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 07:13
Subject: Filesystem tuning for lots of small files (a Maildir)?
> I'm currently facing a problem of having used Netscape (now Mozilla) for
> years in Windows and now trying to find something I can regularly use in
> FreeBSD without losing Mozilla in Windows.
>
> I've mostly settled on IMAP (courier) with procmail filters, but that
> raises the issue of filesystem performance for directories with large
> numbers of files/subdirectories in them. I have more than 32,000 emails
> stored. How do I calculate/see the number of available inodes?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
df -i /filesystem-in-question
> The
> existing filesystem was newfs'd with the sysinstall defaults. Should I
> re-newfs it with different values? What would I want to set them at? I
> know I'd need to adjust things to make sure I have enough inodes for
> 40,000+ files, but what about the block and fragment size? Should I use
> smaller values like 8192/1024 or 4096/512 or is the default 16384/2048
> best? Higher values would just increase slack space, right? What are
> the impacts of lower values?
>
The number of inodes varies with the filesystem size and bytes per inode.
So if you're talking about a huge filesystem, you're probably all set as it
is.
However, I needed a /usr that has many inodes, so I doubled the default by
doing this:
newfs -b 16384 -f 2048 -i 4096 /usr
-i 4096 is half as many bytes per inode compared to the default 8192,
therefore,
I have 2X as many inodes. See newfs(8) for more info. tuning(7) also.
> Some folders, like the one for the postfix-users list, can have
> 3000-4000 messages in them. For growth, we'll say 5000 messages. The
> IMAP layout with Courier means all the folders sit all on one level
> under ~/Maildir, which means I'd have 200 or so subdirectories in one
> place. I have the UFS_DIRHASH option enabled for the my MP3 collection,
> but that's as case of 300 subdirecories in one directory, not 5000
> files. What else can I do to tune for this kind of (ab)use?
>
Not sure.
I hope at least part of this message was somewhat-kinda-sorta-maybe helpful.
[Snipping mail questions; I have no idea.]
-Craig
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