Wishing to possibly change file systems.

evoweiss

Hi all,

At present I have a very stable and working gentoo system, though it's a bit slower than I'd like given the hardware it's on (Pentium 4, 512 megs of RAM, etc.). I installed the system on ext3, so I am wondering whether that may be the cause of its slow behavior (yes, dma and all the other good stuff is enabled!) I also have a second drive which I use to store multimedia stuff, documents, etc.

Might it be that my present file system is the cause for the slowness that I experience, especially when, I think, the HDD is being accessed? If so, what would be involved with changing over to a different file system (is there some painless way of doing it, i.e., without losing what I have, reinstalling, etc.), and, of course, what file system would folks recommend?

I should note that, initially, way back when I started, I was on, I believe, xfs, and that seemed faster. However, I had some really *bad* experiences with it as some power problems in my apartment led to HDD corruption. As such, I would not like to go back to it even though I am in a different place now! Is there some other faster and more reliable file system?

Best,

Alex

P3SM · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 9:37 am Post subject:

The ReiserFS filesystem is known to be very fast on filesystems containing a lot of files (especially when they are small).

Another thing you might try is to 'tune' your harddisk since a lot of times the settings for your HD are not optimal. You can use hdparms for that. You might want to check:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Multi-Disk-HOWTO.html#toc14

There is also some info on tuning your filesystem

Cheers, P3SM
_________________
Smaug: Sun Netra T1 105, UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz, 512MB, 2*36GB 10kRPM; 2 Sun Netra D130: 6*36GB 10kRPM, swraid 0
Haku: Dual P3 Xeon 500MHz, 512MB; Sun Multipack: 12*18GB 10kRPM, hwraid 5
Falkor: Sun SparcStation LX, 128 MB, 2.1GB

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

Just tune ext3.

mark_alec · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 11:00 am Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.

Jaglover · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 11:07 am Post subject:

Thanks Paul for that link! I cannot believe I haven't found it before. I'm a big fan of ext3 too as is the author of the article. (Why kids and noobs think Reiser is any good? Where this "Reiser is fast" myth comes from?) :roll:

P3SM · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 1:33 pm Post subject:

Well Jaglover,

First of all, if you do a search on comparison tests between different FS you can find that the ReiserFS is faster than ext3. Check for instance the conclusion here:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388

Obviously it all depends on how you use the filesystem, which was also in my original post.

Secondly, the fact that this forum decides that somebody is a 'noob' based on the number of postings instead of the quality of their posted content leads me to think that guru status mainly depends on the amount of empty statements somebody can make. Please do not mistake the number of posts with experience!

The idea of this forum is to help people who have questions and make suggestions!

Thank you very much :!:

/P3SM
_________________
Smaug: Sun Netra T1 105, UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz, 512MB, 2*36GB 10kRPM; 2 Sun Netra D130: 6*36GB 10kRPM, swraid 0
Haku: Dual P3 Xeon 500MHz, 512MB; Sun Multipack: 12*18GB 10kRPM, hwraid 5
Falkor: Sun SparcStation LX, 128 MB, 2.1GB

Jaglover · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 1:55 pm Post subject:

First, it was not personal - I did not address you.
Second, I do not decide by posting counts who is noob.
Third, you may want to read the article you linked to.
Fourth, by reading posts on these and other forums I've reached following conclusion:
Reiser suffers from defragmentation and its performance detoriates over time.
Reiser has highest risk of corruption in case of power failure or crash.
Reiser cannot handle huge files.
Fifth, this has been discussed too many times and I'll stop right here.

BTW, I was a Reiser fan when it come out. However, it makes no sense to stick with past. Other filesystems have surpassed Reiser on every count (except small files packing perhaps, but the advantage Reiser has in this field is trivial nowadays and does not compensate other disadvantages).

P3SM · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 2:04 pm Post subject:

Whatever...
_________________
Smaug: Sun Netra T1 105, UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz, 512MB, 2*36GB 10kRPM; 2 Sun Netra D130: 6*36GB 10kRPM, swraid 0
Haku: Dual P3 Xeon 500MHz, 512MB; Sun Multipack: 12*18GB 10kRPM, hwraid 5
Falkor: Sun SparcStation LX, 128 MB, 2.1GB