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Date:      Wed, 4 Oct 2000 08:28:43 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
To:        Alex Povolotsky <tarkhil@over.ru>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Specialised storage system?
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1001004082541.3976A-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <20001004150052.E32009@mail.over.ru>

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On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Alex Povolotsky wrote:

> I'm looking to try writing high-performance storage system for mail, 
> intended to boost large free mail system.
> 
> It seems to me that such a system will give enough performance gains while
> requiring less effor that a full-featured file system, and may provide good
> basis for writing a file-system later.
> 
> Maybe someone will point me at existing attempts and/or join effort?

It might be interesting to adapt the Cyrus mail server to use IFS, Adrian
Chadd's FFS-lite for backend storage.  IFS only supports inode numbers as
filenames, meaning constant lookup time for a vnode, eliminating the cost
of directory and namespace management.  He developed it for use with
Squid, but you could imagine using it as a backing store for other
services that provide their own meta-data management (AFS/Coda caches,
news server backends, Cyrus mail server stuff, etc).  Most of these would
require improved service-layer database management, as both news servers
and cyrus rely on the directory layout to indicate that a message belongs
to a particular folder; putting that in a central database would realize
real performance benefits however.  Coda and AFS could probably be
trivially modified to use IFS.

  Robert N M Watson 

robert@fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/
PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37  ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1
TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services




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