Mail storage on shared disks
============================

Dovecot supports keeping mails and index files in clustered filesystems, such
as Red Hat GFS [http://www.redhat.com/gfs/], Oracle OCFS2
[http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/] and HP Polyserve Matrix
[http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/software/clusteredfs/index.html].

Dovecot also supports keeping mails and index files on NFS. Everything
described in this page applies to NFS as well, but see <NFS.txt> for more
NFS-specific problems and optimizations.

Memory mapping
--------------

By default Dovecot mmap()s the index files. This may not work with all
clustered filesystems, and it most certainly won't work with NFS. Setting
'mmap_disable = yes' disables mmap() and Dovecot does its own internal caching.
If mmap() is supported by your filesystem, it's still not certain that it gives
better performance. Try benchmarking to make sure.

Locking
-------

Dovecot supports locking index files with fcntl (default), flock or dotlocks.
Some clustered filesystems may not support fcntl, so you can change it to use
flock instead. Fcntl locks may also cause problems with some NFS
configurations, in which case you can try if switching to dotlocks helps. Note
that dotlocks are the slowest locking method. You can change the locking method
from 'lock_method' setting.

Regardless of the 'lock_method' setting, Dovecot always uses dotlocks for some
locks. Because of this, setting 'dotlock_use_excl=yes' will also improve the
performance (default in v1.1+). Before doing that with NFS, make sure that your
NFS client and server support O_EXCL (NFSv3+ should be fine).

Clock synchronization
---------------------

Run ntpd in each computer to make sure their clocks are synchronized. If the
clocks are more than one second apart from each others and multiple computers
access the same mailbox simultaneously, you may get errors.

Caching
-------

Your cluster will probably perform better if users are usually redirected to
the same server. This is because the mailbox may already be cached in the
memory and it may also reduce the traffic between the clusterfs nodes. At the
very least make sure that the concurrent connections coming for the user from
the same IP address go to the same server.

FUSE / GlusterFS
----------------

FUSE caches dentries and file attributes internally. If you're using multiple
GlusterFS clients to access the same mailboxes, you're going to have problems.
With v1.1 these can be avoided by using NFS cache flushes, which just happen to
work with FUSE as well:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
mail_nfs_index = yes
mail_nfs_storage = yes
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

(This file was created from the wiki on 2010-05-24 04:42)
