[Gluster-users] GlusterFS on mailservers

Joe Landman landman at scalableinformatics.com
Mon Nov 15 15:18:28 UTC 2010


On 11/15/2010 09:47 AM, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:

>> Stephan -
>>      Dovecot has been a challenge in the past. We don't specifically test
>> with it here, if you are interested in using it with Gluster I would
>> suggest testing with 3.1.1, and always keep the index files local, that
>> makes a big difference.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Craig
>
> Well, Craig, I cannot follow your advice as these are 32 bit clients and AFAIK
> you said 3.1.1 is not expected to be used in such an environment.
> Really quite a lot of interesting setups for glusterfs turn around mail
> servers, I judge it to be a major deficiency if the fs cannot be used for such

Quick interjection here:  We have some customers using Dovecot on our 
storage units with GlusterFS 3.0.x.  There are some issues, usually 
interactions between dovecot and fuse/glusterfs.  Nothing that can't be 
worked around.  We are seeing strong/growing interest from our customer 
base in this use case.

Craig's advice is spot on.

> purposes. You cannot expect voting for glusterfs if there are other options
> that have no problems with such a standard setup. I mean is there something
> more obvious than mailservers for such a fs?

Hmmm ... apart from NFS (which isn't a cluster file system), which has a 
number of its own issues, which other cluster file system are you 
referring to, that don't have these sorts of issues?  Small file and 
small record performance on any sort of cluster file system is very 
hard.  You have to get it right first, and then work on the performance 
side later.

> Honestly, I got the impression that you're heading away from the mainstream fs
> usage to very special environments and usage patterns.
> I feel very sorry about that because 2.X looked very promising. But I did not
> find a single setup where 3.X could be used at all.

While I respect your opinion, I do disagree with it. In our opinion 
3.1.x has gotten better than 3.0.x, which was a huge step up from 2.0.x.

Regards,

Joe

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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