dovecot - Jul 2010 - Dovecot and SSD

I'm considering setting up my own mailserver with Dovecot 2.0 (as soon
as it's out) and SSD. I'm debating whether it's worth it or not. I
have been running a mailserver with the Dovecot 1.1 train for a couple
of years and it's been flawless and amazing. I'm thinking about using
either FreeBSD 8.1 w/ZFS or OpenBSD 4.8-beta on a 64 GB or 80 GB SSD
(Corsair or Intel) using Dovecot 2.0 and mdbox. It seems like mdbox
would benefit the most from an SSD because reads would be extremely
fast while minimal writes (comparatively) take place due to the way
mdbox is structured. I guess what I'm saying is that even if the SSD
has average to slow write speeds the fast read speeds would make a big
difference in many operations. Any thoughts? Alternately, run either
option on a hard drive with indexes on fast flash memory. Anyone tried
something like that? Thank you.

Bryan

On 29.7.2010, at 1.05, Bryan Vyhmeister wrote:
> It seems like mdbox
> would benefit the most from an SSD because reads would be extremely
> fast while minimal writes (comparatively) take place due to the way
> mdbox is structured.
I'd think that with SSD mdbox would make less sense, since fragmentation
isn't so much of a problem with SSDs. I've no benchmarks, but I
wouldn't be surprised if sdbox performance was faster. In any case mdbox
requires an extra index file that sdbox doesn't, which also increases disk
writes.

On 2010-07-28 19:05:25 -0400, Bryan Vyhmeister wrote:
> I'm considering setting up my own mailserver with Dovecot 2.0 (as soon
> as it's out) and SSD. I'm debating whether it's worth it or
not. I
> have been running a mailserver with the Dovecot 1.1 train for a couple
> of years and it's been flawless and amazing. I'm thinking about
using
> either FreeBSD 8.1 w/ZFS or OpenBSD 4.8-beta on a 64 GB or 80 GB SSD
> (Corsair or Intel) using Dovecot 2.0 and mdbox. It seems like mdbox
> would benefit the most from an SSD because reads would be extremely
> fast while minimal writes (comparatively) take place due to the way
> mdbox is structured. I guess what I'm saying is that even if the SSD
> has average to slow write speeds the fast read speeds would make a big
> difference in many operations. Any thoughts? Alternately, run either
> option on a hard drive with indexes on fast flash memory. Anyone tried
> something like that? Thank you.
maybe dont put the whole FS on the SSD.

we had great speed ups when we just moved the FS journal onto the SSD.

    darix

-- 
           openSUSE - SUSE Linux is my linux
               openSUSE is good for you
                   www.opensuse.org

Bryan Vyhmeister put forth on 7/28/2010 6:05 PM:
> I'm considering setting up my own mailserver with Dovecot 2.0 (as soon
> as it's out) and SSD. I'm debating whether it's worth it or
not. I
> have been running a mailserver with the Dovecot 1.1 train for a couple
> of years and it's been flawless and amazing. I'm thinking about
using
> either FreeBSD 8.1 w/ZFS or OpenBSD 4.8-beta on a 64 GB or 80 GB SSD
> (Corsair or Intel) using Dovecot 2.0 and mdbox. It seems like mdbox
> would benefit the most from an SSD because reads would be extremely
> fast while minimal writes (comparatively) take place due to the way
> mdbox is structured. I guess what I'm saying is that even if the SSD
> has average to slow write speeds the fast read speeds would make a big
> difference in many operations. Any thoughts? Alternately, run either
> option on a hard drive with indexes on fast flash memory. Anyone tried
> something like that? Thank you.
How many users?

-- 
Stan

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan at hardwarefreak.com>
wrote:
>
> How many users?
>
To start with, about 20 users. It will grow to around 100 users at the max.

Bryan

Bryan Vyhmeister put forth on 7/29/2010 6:40 AM:
> On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan at
hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
>>
>> How many users?
>>
> 
> To start with, about 20 users. It will grow to around 100 users at the max.
At 100 users you should have ~500MB/user after OS and software overhead.  That
should be more than enough for most average users I would think.

-- 
Stan