[KLUG Members] NFS / server tuning for mail storage?

[Jamie McCarthy]

adam at morrison-ind.com (Adam Tauno Williams) writes:

> > My plans are to use LVS and balance say, 3 to 4 servers from
> > the 800 to 1200 MHz range handling mail services, with them all
> > connecting to the netapp back end via NFS.
> 
> You are crazy.
> 
> (a) NFS latency and locking issues will *****DESTROY****** your
> network.

Yeah.  NFS is really a lousy filesystem.  It's just barely good
enough to use on small projects, but for serious work it just falls
apart.

At least for read/write data.  It seems to work fine for mounts that
are shared read-only.  Slashdot's webheads all mount the application
code and data with read-only NFS and it's been a long time since
we've had any problems.  (We had a lockups every six months, some
years ago, but those went away after some upgrade in '03 or '04.)
So if you just want to push data from a central location out to a
bunch of servers, NFS is worth considering.
-- 
  Jamie McCarthy
 http://mccarthy.vg/
  jamie at mccarthy.vg