Re: librmb: Mail storage on RADOS with Dovecot

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



 
>From the looks of it, to bad the efforts could not be 
combined/coordinated, that seems to be an issue with many open source 
initiatives.


-----Original Message-----
From: mj [mailto:lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: zondag 24 september 2017 16:37
To: ceph-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re:  librmb: Mail storage on RADOS with Dovecot

Hi,

I forwarded your announcement to the dovecot  mailinglist. The following 
reply to it was posted by there by Timo Sirainen. I'm forwarding it 
here, as you might not be reading the dovecot mailinglist.

Wido:
> First, the Github link:
> https://github.com/ceph-dovecot/dovecot-ceph-plugin
> 
> I am not going to repeat everything which is on Github, put a short 
summary:
> 
> - CephFS is used for storing Mailbox Indexes
> - E-Mails are stored directly as RADOS objects
> - It's a Dovecot plugin
> 
> We would like everybody to test librmb and report back issues on 
Github so that further development can be done.
> 
> It's not finalized yet, but all the help is welcome to make librmb the 
best solution for storing your e-mails on Ceph with Dovecot.

Timo:
It would be have been nicer if RADOS support was implemented as lib-fs 
driver, and the fs-API had been used all over the place elsewhere. So 1) 
LibRadosMailBox wouldn't have been relying so much on RADOS specifically 
and 2) fs-rados could have been used for other purposes. There are 
already fs-dict and dict-fs drivers, so the RADOS dict driver may not 
have been necessary to implement if fs-rados was implemented instead 
(although I didn't check it closely enough to verify). (We've had 
fs-rados on our TODO list for a while also.)

BTW. We've also been planning on open sourcing some of the obox pieces, 
mainly fs-drivers (e.g. fs-s3). The obox format maybe too, but without 
the "metacache" piece. The current obox code is a bit too much married 
into the metacache though to make open sourcing it easy. (The metacache 
is about storing the Dovecot index files in object storage and 
efficiently caching them on local filesystem, which isn't planned to be 
open sourced in near future. That's pretty much the only difficult piece 
of the obox plugin, with Cassandra integration coming as a good second. 
I wish there had been a better/easier geo-distributed key-value database 
to use - tombstones are annoyingly troublesome.)

And using rmb-mailbox format, my main worries would be:
  * doesn't store index files (= message flags) - not necessarily a 
problem, as long as you don't want geo-replication
  * index corruption means rebuilding them, which means rescanning list 
of mail files, which means rescanning the whole RADOS namespace, which 
practically means  rescanning the RADOS pool. That most likely is a very 
very slow operation, which you want to avoid unless it's absolutely 
necessary. Need to be very careful to avoid that happening, and in 
general to avoid losing mails in case of crashes or other bugs.
  * I think copying/moving mails physically copies the full data on disk
  * Each IMAP/POP3/LMTP/etc process connects to RADOS separately from 
each others - some connection pooling would likely help here

_______________________________________________
ceph-users mailing list
ceph-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ceph.com/listinfo.cgi/ceph-users-ceph.com


_______________________________________________
ceph-users mailing list
ceph-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ceph.com/listinfo.cgi/ceph-users-ceph.com



[Index of Archives]     [Information on CEPH]     [Linux Filesystem Development]     [Ceph Development]     [Ceph Large]     [Linux USB Development]     [Video for Linux]     [Linux Audio Users]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux Kernel]     [Linux SCSI]     [xfs]


  Powered by Linux