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Date:      Thu, 31 Jul 2003 21:32:42 +0100 (BST)
From:      Mark Powell <M.S.Powell@salford.ac.uk>
To:        freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   NetAPP, 4.8S and optimal directory size
Message-ID:  <20030731211902.D63113@plato.salford.ac.uk>

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Hi,
  We currently have POP systems using qmail's Maildir to store email. We
split the username into a directory tree to prevent us having one
directory containing 25k dirs.
  We've now got a NetAPP as a store for an imap solution; qmail w.
Maildir, courier-imap, apache, horde & imp.
  Our current system of spliting usernames can still lead to directorys
containging up to 1K other dirs. I'm thinking of spliting the usernames
even further so user123 would be stored in dir:

/mail/u/s/e/r/1/2/3/

  I'm wondering where the trade-off between directory size and the extra
work of looking into a new dir comes i.e. would be better spliting along
the lines of:

/mail/us/er/12/3/

  TIA BTW Unfortunately the gigabit switch they are plugged into (Cisco
3550-12T) only has a maximum frame size of 2000 bytes, so jumbo frames are
really out of the window at the moment. That said the performance of the
NetAPP has been pretty astonishing. 60MBytes/s on some NFS operations and
even 100MBytes/s including the help of nfsiod. It's often faster than a
RAID1 array with 15k disks on the Dell PERC3/Di controller. They aren't
cheap, but they certainly seem to be worth it.
  Cheers.

-- 
Mark Powell - UNIX System Administrator - The University of Salford
Information Services Division, Clifford Whitworth Building,
Salford University, Manchester, M5 4WT, UK.
Tel: +44 161 295 5936  Fax: +44 161 295 5888  www.pgp.com for PGP key



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