From owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 31 13:32:45 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9AE1A37B401 for ; Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:32:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pan.salford.ac.uk (pan.salford.ac.uk [146.87.255.104]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 51AD643F85 for ; Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:32:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from M.S.Powell@salford.ac.uk) Received: (qmail 88131 invoked by alias); 31 Jul 2003 20:32:43 -0000 Received: (qmail 88123 invoked from network); 31 Jul 2003 20:32:43 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO plato.salford.ac.uk) (146.87.255.76) by pan.salford.ac.uk with SMTP; 31 Jul 2003 20:32:43 -0000 Received: (qmail 63137 invoked by uid 1001); 31 Jul 2003 20:32:42 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 31 Jul 2003 20:32:42 -0000 Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 21:32:42 +0100 (BST) From: Mark Powell To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20030731211902.D63113@plato.salford.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: NetAPP, 4.8S and optimal directory size X-BeenThere: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Internet Services Providers List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 20:32:45 -0000 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