[Mimedefang] Server load

[David F. Skoll]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Dirk Mueller wrote:

> Replace ext3 by reiser. Reiser is a lot faster during creating and deleting 
> small files, which is what mimedefang is most of the time doing. 

Nick Christenson, in "Sendmail Performance Tuning" (Addison-Wesley),
ran tests and found ext3 to be significantly faster than Reiser.
Granted, he put lots of caveats about his tests not necessarily
reflecting the real world, but if you are creating *and then quickly
deleting* lots of small files, ext3 performs extremely well.  It can
often coalesce the create/delete journal entries into essentially a
no-op.  If you do not quickly delete the files, then ext3 is not so
good.

So for /var/spool/MIMEDefang, ext3 is probably better.  For
/var/spool/mqueue, where files may have longer lifetimes (because of
down hosts or whatever), the situation may not be so clear.

--
David.