newfs options + hardware raid

[Tom Samplonius]

On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've been looking at various archives of the FreeBSD lists, as well as
> Google (web/usenet) and I'm not seeing anything about suggestions on
> setting up a mail server with Maildir format boxes.  I posted to -isp, but
> that seems pretty low-volume these days, so I thought I might find some
> good advice here...
> 
> I've looked through some smaller mail servers that are using Maildir and
> I'm finding the average message size is about 3K.  That leads me to
> believe I'd likely be better off setting my blocksize down to perhaps 4096
> or 8192 rather than the default 16K.  I may also bump the inodes up as I'm
> looking at a total of about 4000 mailboxes, and eventually upwards of
> 8000, and I'd hate to dump/newfs/restore in the future...

  Besides the block size, UFS can also support fragments (partial blocks).
So 16KB isn't necessaily allocated for a 3K file.  The default is 16KB and
2KB respectively.  8KB and 1KB might be better for a MailDir system.

> My main question now is what I should do with the RAID setup.  I'll be
> using an Adaptec 2100S and if I recall correctly there are block/stripe
> size settings there as well.  This will be a 0+1 array.  Should I alter
> those defaults to match the block size of the underlying filesystem??

  No.  The usual advice is to use as strip size as large as possible.
But for hardware RAID, usually the default setting is the best for that
particular hardware.

  8000 mailboxes really ins't a lot though.

> Thanks, and sorry for the slightly OT,
> 
> Charles
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-scsi at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-scsi
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-scsi-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> 
>