best file system ?

Marc Stuermer
Thu, 18 Dec 2014 08:57:59 -0000

Am 01.12.2014 um 17:24 schrieb absolutely_free at libero.it:

> I'm going to set up a new storage for our email users (about 10k).
> It's a network attached storage (Coraid).
> In your opinion, what is the best file system for mail server
(pop3/imap/webmail) purpose?

It depends on how conservative you are. Btrfs won't cut it, because too
slow and still too much experimental.

ZFS on Linux is being maintained outside the kernel and eats up memory
like a horde of cockroaches. So this is also for most no viable choice.

This brings down either ext4 or XFS. Both file systems have a decade old
code base and are quite mature.

If you need the ability to shrink a file system, it's ext4. If you are
on the conservative side, it's also quite ext4.

If you are feeling a little bit more adventurous, it's XFS. Note that
XFS had some serious bottle necks in writing to its journal which have
been solved in kernel 3.3.

XFS is kinda a somewhat difficult topic; some people love it and have no
problems with it at all, while other people say they've seen serious
problems with it.

There's been for example a talk by Peer Heinlein on Linux Tag 2012,
where he gave us his insights about migrating his mail user base (>
100.000 accounts on roughly 12 TB storage) away from Maildir to mdbox.

He told there that he had seen at least three cases of XFS failure and
therefore he considers it unreliable; he switched from ext3 to ext4.