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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.

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. You can
use <director> [Director.txt] service to do this easily automatically. Or at
the very least make sure that your load balancer redirects connections from the
same IP address 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.
Worst of these problems 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
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

These probably don't work perfectly.

Samba / CIFS
------------

Dovecot's temporary files may include a colon character ':' in their filename,
which is not a permitted character when using cifs.Dovecot also renames the
temporary files whilst holding a lock in them, which generates the error 'Text
file is busy'.

Cifs/smbfs is unlikely to work as a remote filesystem.

(This file was created from the wiki on 2019-06-19 12:42)