The Filesystem choice thread

Lovechild · Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2002 1:16 pm Post subject:

I'm surprised that noone has mentioned JFS yet, I used this FS for a while on Mandrake, and while a bit unstable it seems fast.

I'm personally looking forward Reiser4, I currently use ReiserFS3 and it serves me well, good speed and good stability, but the new release is said to be 50-100% faster.... now that's quite a chunk of cheeze....

pilla · Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2002 2:05 pm Post subject:

My sense of adventure is far away from my thesis

dpowers · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 May 2002 Posts: 119

This is an excellent thread, and Reiser appears to be the general winner. Besides the -tail/-notail stuff, what are some other things that one should know about Reiser. Any other flags to set? Any other useful tidbits of knowledge about it?

Thanks for all the great great info.

-dpowers

squanto · Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2002 5:32 pm Post subject:

boyo · n00b Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 53 Location: MI

lupad, what a great post. Thanks fo rthe info. You're the man. Is your controller ATA-133?

As is stands Reiser4 looks to be the hands down winner and their website has Dec. 31 listed as the due date. Whether that's for the FS itself or just a finalized revision of that document I have no idea. I'd like to assume it's the release date for Reiser4. I'm wondering if the SGI camp is going to cook up anything big in the near future. It's been a while since I've heard a peep from them about XFS.

mooman · Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2002 1:34 am Post subject:

I'm a noob on the FS subject, but wanted to point out an application consideration for filesystems...

If reiser is superior for smaller files, then an excellent match would be a mailserver (or mail proxy, or even a personal box) that uses the maildir format. This approach stores each email as a seperate text file, so it would stand to benefit considerably from that optimization.

Ditto for a web proxy like squid. Squid expects the average file size of cached objects to be around 13K. Which means there will be quite a few 1k to 5K type files that would benefit from an optimal filesystem.

Conversely, an MP3 server or GIMP workstation probably don't gain much from small file improvements.

Anyway, just wanted to reframe the conversation from "Which one is best?" to "which one is best for the role of the box?"... Of course, stability is a whole 'nuther issue.

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Linux user off and on since circa 1995

boyo · n00b Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 53 Location: MI

That's a good point. However, if Reiser4 lives up to it's own documentation then we should have a clear winner in nearly every category. Dec. 31 is just over a month away. It won't long till we find out (hopefully).

eryvile · Apprentice Joined: 14 Aug 2002 Posts: 234 Location: europe

McManus · Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2002 8:41 pm Post subject:

I have to say, in the past I've used ReiserFS, and it was rather fast. However, I ran into corruption problems all the time, and decided it wasn't worth it...

...However, nowadays, ReiserFS seems to be the FS of choice for a lot of Gentoo developers (Robbins included), and I have tried it recently and it does seem to be stable. However, I'm still wary of corruption problems that I've had in the past. If an FS is prone to corruption whenever the VM Manager changes (which it has quite frequently in the past), then while it might not be unstable now, it could be later.

Plus, I've NEVER had any corruption with ext3, and since data integrity is more important to me, I think I'll stick with ext3 for now. But I guess the point is, figure out what you want and try it; if it doesn't work well, try something else. It's all about your own experience. (what works for someone else might not work for you, and vice-versa)

...a good example of this is when DRobbins was saying how he never had any issues with ReiserFS in SuSE, because they tweaked their kernel to properly support ReiserFS... well, it was in SuSE that I had ALL my ReiserFS problems....

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McManus
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Linux user #267375 - http://counter.li.org

TheEternalVortex · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 8:27 am Post subject:

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.41 seconds =312.20 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.39 seconds = 46.04 MB/sec

Of course, this makes up for that:

/dev/hdb:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.45 seconds =284.44 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.28 seconds = 14.95 MB/sec

Gentoo is installed on /dev/hdb

.
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-- Andy

squanto · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 4:37 pm Post subject:

Well... after borking my Gentoo install on my desktop, (i somehow got rid of glibc...) I decided to just do a mkreiserfs onto that partition and start over.
I have had some wierd problems since doing this. I would alter files, such as XF86Config and then do a startx and half of what I had changed in the file would change back or be erased entirely, the first half of the file got deleted one time.
Not sure if this is a reiser thing, but going to end up zeroing out the partition and then trying the install again... arg...

I am going to stay with reiser though.

whit

I've had reiser on several production servers - Web and FTP with lots of files coming and going - as well as on several desktops for well over a year. The only case of data loss or corruption was on one of the desktops when the drive developed a bad spot - obviously hardware - an the reiser recovery utility (advertised as beta) couldn't deal with the bad spot and lost the whole partition. That noted, most of the partition was still accessible before trying to use reiser tools to recover it, and I don't know that another format would have been any better. I've never had any loss in reiser due to power losses, and by comparison ext3 seems much slower in checking its logs and partitions when coming back up after a power loss. But ext3 has the advantage that ext2 can be converted to it - running ext2 for anything but maybe a boot partition is certainly less safe.

darktux · Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 1:21 pm Post subject:

Here's a website for you about ext3 :-)

http://tuxslare.org/index.php?secs=extended&id=392

klimg · n00b Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 55

Well - since this is the filesystem thread.I just installed JFS on one partition with kernel 2.4.20.All other partitions are ext3.If I move a big <200mb file between ext3 partitions it goes at about 1 MB/s.From a ext3 to the JFS partition it moves at 12 MB/s.Real strange.

CoronaLover · Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2002 5:00 pm Post subject:

Welll I am using kernel 2.5.50 with ext3 because ext3 got some very big speed improvments in the 2.5 tree.
the Orlov Block Allocator, HTREE, fsync speedups (wich can sometimes couse filesystem corruption on 2.4.20...), and other misc stuff.
wanted to use Reiser4 but the latest snapshot is for kernel 2.5.48 and 2.5.48 looks like a pretty bad kernel.

klimg · n00b Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 55

Disregard my post - I did move a file from /home which is a ok partition to JFS.When I tried to ext3 I used /data as a source which is fragmented like hell.If I do it from fragmented ext3 to JFS I get about 40% higher speed.

matthead · n00b Joined: 04 Dec 2002 Posts: 63

I put together a feature comparison table, mostly for my own use. After seeing this thread, I'd like to share.

I'd love any feedback anyone would like to give.

-Matt

squanto · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 1:49 am Post subject: Re: Comparison Table

matthead · n00b Joined: 04 Dec 2002 Posts: 63

Well, it mostly is. I remember one of the old reiserfs problems being that some NFS operation required the inode number for a file to remain constant, and reiserfs kept returning different numbers. Or something like that.

I could've sworn I read on the JFS project website that there were problems with NFS, but I cannot seem to find what I thought I saw. I'll keep looking through the docs, and change that item in the table if I can't find anything.

frogger · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2002 Posts: 35

I've been using reiserfs for at least 1.5 years now. Even in its "unstable" days I never experienced any data loss. I've been running it on a Slack 8.0 proxy/webserver, since shortly after Slack 8 was released, and it has been rock solid. Also running it on my Gentoo workstation without problems.

I've also tried XFS and had no problems with that either, but moved away from it as I prefer to use the vanilla kernel, and XFS is one big patch.

Also tried ext3 with no problems at one point:)

So basically, either I'm lucky or they are all relatively stable.

PlatinumCursor · Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 3:30 am Post subject:

Ive been using ReiserFS ever since support first came in the 2.4 kernel - Never once have I lost data or had any corruption whatsoever. I have tried ext3, and before 2.4 I used ext2, and I must say that for speed, nothing beats reiserfs. I do alot of web design, image editing, and some gaming on the side, and I can say that for these things, Ive seen a big boost with Reiserfs.
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PlatinumCursor
Blinded by the bling...

klimg · n00b Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 55

I had a very specific problem with ext3.When I download a file with mldokey it all gets split up in 9mb pieces.When I try to write this to a CD at 32X I get constant buffer underruns and a effective speed of about 8X.I did throw a JFS filesystem on there and now the buffer underruns are gone (min. buffer fill 98%) and speed average is about 22X.Seems to be pretty fast in piecing stuff together.

absinthe · Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2002 9:21 pm Post subject:

My filesystem can kick your filesystem's ass.

:twisted:

huhmz · n00b Joined: 16 Aug 2002 Posts: 16

I was using ext3 and one day there was a power outage, rebooted and the fs was totally screwed and fsck like the worthless bitch it is of course could do nothing.
XFS lagged my computer under very heavy diskusage, ie copying files and running SQL with lots of inserts.
ReiserFS - Now thats what im talking about, no lag, very fast, no data corruption (so far, and I have shut down unclean a number of times). Im running it with quota patches on my Debian server I keep at the university and of course at home on my Gentoo desktop. Rock stable. And I head ReiserFS 4 is going to be 100% (in some cases) faster.
And you dont waste any space because of silly cluster sizes (unless mounted with notail)

TrueDis · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2002 Posts: 48