At 05:16 AM 1/27/2009, Cory Meyer wrote: >There was some talk of using GlusterFS for email storage last >November. Is anyone else successfully using this in a production enviroment? I use glusterfs 2.0rc1 on production web hosting environment, so this has email/imap/web/ftp we don't really overload our servers so haven't really run into any performance issues. There is still some performance issues related to small files, but this is mostly a fuse issue I belive. We're going to be testing out mod_glusterfs in apache shortly to see if we get any noticeable web performance improvements, but on the mail things seem ok, although people using imap with >1500 messages in a folder sometimes experience long loading times, but this is mostly due to the imap server being stupid. On the systems we've switched to dovecot from courier, this is less of an issue. for POP it all seems to work just fine. I'd definitely avoid courier not because of gluster just because it's terribly inefficient--it doesn't cache mail headers as far as I can tell and so it scans the filesystem every time someone establishes an imap connection--this is inefficient no matter what your filesystem. for SMTP services we use exim instead of sendmail. Sendmail is terribly inefficient. Also it would depend how you configure it.. .presumably the cache/spool files would be on a local filesystem, and the delivered mail on a shared glusterfs. if you want to spool into gluster you might be ok, but you'll possibly have multiple sendmail daemons fighting over the right to send a message and you'll likely have problems by having multiple machines attempting to send messages more frequently than the receiving servers want to hear from you. Our email load also isn't too out of hand and the only thing that ever causes a problem is the anti-spam software (which processes messages outside of gluster, so that's not an issue). hoep that helps.
