From owner-freebsd-fs Wed Oct 4 5:29:18 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E12D037B66D for ; Wed, 4 Oct 2000 05:29:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id IAA04013; Wed, 4 Oct 2000 08:28:43 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 08:28:43 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Alex Povolotsky Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Specialised storage system? In-Reply-To: <20001004150052.E32009@mail.over.ru> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Alex Povolotsky wrote: > I'm looking to try writing high-performance storage system for mail, > intended to boost large free mail system. > > It seems to me that such a system will give enough performance gains while > requiring less effor that a full-featured file system, and may provide good > basis for writing a file-system later. > > Maybe someone will point me at existing attempts and/or join effort? It might be interesting to adapt the Cyrus mail server to use IFS, Adrian Chadd's FFS-lite for backend storage. IFS only supports inode numbers as filenames, meaning constant lookup time for a vnode, eliminating the cost of directory and namespace management. He developed it for use with Squid, but you could imagine using it as a backing store for other services that provide their own meta-data management (AFS/Coda caches, news server backends, Cyrus mail server stuff, etc). Most of these would require improved service-layer database management, as both news servers and cyrus rely on the directory layout to indicate that a message belongs to a particular folder; putting that in a central database would realize real performance benefits however. Coda and AFS could probably be trivially modified to use IFS. Robert N M Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37 ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1 TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message