From owner-freebsd-chat Sat Nov 23 16:43: 3 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6215237B401 for ; Sat, 23 Nov 2002 16:43:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from williams.mc.vanderbilt.edu (williams.mc.Vanderbilt.Edu [160.129.208.222]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id A5E9943E9C for ; Sat, 23 Nov 2002 16:43:01 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drew-public@poured.net) Received: (qmail 4274 invoked by uid 19192); 24 Nov 2002 00:43:12 -0000 To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: mail queues on softdep (was Re: Sharing calendars?) References: <3DE00781.F47E59A1@mindspring.com> Reply-To: drew-dated-1038529607.6fb7a6@poured.net Gmane-From: drew@poured.net Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 18:43:10 -0600 In-Reply-To: <3DE00781.F47E59A1@mindspring.com> (Terry Lambert's message of "Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:56:01 -0800") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.090008 (Oort Gnus v0.08) XEmacs/21.4 (Military Intelligence, sparc-sun-solaris2.7) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: Drew Raines X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.65+ (Gallahadion) Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Terry Lambert writes: > Drew Raines wrote: >> Brad Knowles writes: >> > At the very least, if you do decide to continue with qmail, >> > make sure you turn off softupdates for that filesystem. >> >> By ``that'' filesystem, he means /var/qmail/queue. You can keep >> everything else on a vanilla FFS partition. It's the same >> recommendation for any mail queue whose contents you care about. > > Why are soft updates bad for mail queues, in your opinions? My opinions aren't authoritative because I've never (knowingly) experienced it, but apparently a message could be lost if it's accepted by the MTA and there's a system failure before the metadata gets written to the disk. This could happen with sync, too, I guess, but the latency is increased with soft updates. There might be characteristics of qmail's queue which causes it to be more susceptible than others, but the logic seems to apply to all. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message