glusterfs and dovecot problems

I have glusterfs deployed for a few projects, not using it though as the backend storage for IMAP/SMTP storage.

But from experience can say a few things:

First of all I would not recommend anyone use distributed file systems for storage backend on high transactional workloads such as IMAP and SMTP. Since they do not work with them well , mostly because of two reasons: high latency and problems with file locking.

Secondly, have spent quite some time on gluster freenode channel seen people reporting about Dovecot complaining about constant index corruption gluster does. So i would strongly recommend you to utilize some other back storage replication solution, dsync replication or something similar.

Hope this helps.