move inboxes to another partition for I/O

[w00005414]

Our Red Hat Linux AS 3.0 server is grinding to a halt due to a disk i/o bottleneck. I have another RAID 1 set on the server and I would like to move some users inboxes from /var/spool/mail to this new drive to split up the i/o but I can't seem to figure it out. I tried moving the mail spool file then creating a symlink but Sendmail renamed the link, wrote a "Renamed bogus" line to the maillog file, and just created a new inbox in /var/spool/mail. I tried a hard link but it is not allowed across devices. I also tried setting a user's "MAIL" variable to the new location but that didn't help, something tells me that is just for command line email readers like Pine. Are there sendmail directives I can change or a config file (or any file) that will let me spread out the mailboxes? Not only will Sendmail/procmail need to deliver new mail to the new location but the imapd and pop3d servers running under xinetd will need to follow the new path as well.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated

Thanx

 

[Rhinokiller]

From one of my previous posts:

Looks like you are sending a lot of mail for just one queue. Have u tried setting up multiple queues ?
I did a set up like this a while ago for an ISP.
What I did was created multiple queues in the file system (on seperate physical disks)
/mailq/q.1
/mailq/q.2
/mailq/q.3
What this did was increase the IOP capacity by a factor of three. Then you need to add the following to your sendmail.mc
define(`QUEUE_DIR',`/mailq/q.*')
Run the sendmail.mc through the m4 preprocessor
m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
Now restart sendmail.
It worked for them

** Note the line added to the sendmail.mc ***

Cogito Ergo Sum - Non Compos Mentis

 

[w00005414]

Thanks for the suggestion. The /var/spool/mqueue folder is on a different spindle from the one used to read email so I am not sure that it even comes into play as an issue. Also, we do not use this server to send out email, clients on the network send out their email through a different server. When you said "Looks like you are sending a lot of mail for just one queue", does that mean that mqueue is used to deliver email locally as well?

Thanks for the response.