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From: Charles McManis <cmcmanis@mcmanis.com>
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cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD filesystem performance in Enterprise
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FFS is fine, until you crash. 

Generally a FreeBSD machine with FFS and Softdeps can keep up, the challenge 
comes when you have to fsck everything to get back from a crash. That is why 
things like LFS et alia are useful. For things like mail directories the 
problem can be partitioned into dozens or thousands of nodes. Yahoo uses 
NetApp filers for this. 

How many filesystem ops/second? Generally it will constrain how many emails a 
day you process at some level. Will it work? Sure, it will work fine. And on 
a RAID system it will be unlikely to corrupt data, and with a file system 
mirror you will be unlikely to lose data. 

--Chuck