dovecot, maildir, UFS 2 performance

[Lowell Gilbert]

Laszlo Nagy <gandalf at shopzeus.com> writes:

> Wojciech Puchar said:
>> i have everything (/) on single partition on most of my servers,
>> including those having lots of mail.

> I don't think that is clever. sysinstall creates different partitions
> for / /usr /var and /tmp by default. There must be good reasons for
> this.

There are a number of reasons, not all of which will apply to any
given situation.

1) [as Wojciech Puchar said] tradition.  Not an especially good reason
   on its own.

2) keeping problems on one partition from raising trouble on another
   partition.  e.g., filesystem corruption in a home directory keeping
   the root from being able to boot, or filling up a mail directory
   keeping people from logging in.

3) fsck: Background fsck can't be done on the root filesystem, so if
   you have a large root, that amounts to a substantial delay booting
   after a crash.

4) backups: dump(8) works on a filesystem basis, so organizing the
   data for backup (with dump) means organizing according to
   filesystem.  The same applies to snapshots.



-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/