[Gluster-users] GlusterFS performance with small files.

[Brian Candler]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2012 at 11:05:20AM +0100, David Whiteman wrote:
> I am currently looking into GlusterFS to use as a storage cluster
> for our email storage. I want to mount the storage from different
> servers (or VMs), services accessing the storage include exim,
> courier-imapd, courier-pop3d. Our emails are stored in MailDir
> format, which is many small files. I have read that GlusterFS
> doesn't perform very well with small files, is this still the case?

Depends. A *replicated* volume may be very slow, but maybe you don't need
this - e.g.  you can use a non-replicated (or distributed) volume, with
geo-replication to make an off-site disaster recovery backup. It's a
tradeoff between high availability and performance.

> Is there any utilities I can use to test the performance?

I think on coker.com.au there are some benchmark utilities for mail delivery
and retrieval.