JFS as rootfs very slow on Gentoo bootstrapping; better XFS?

devnull42 · n00b Joined: 24 Feb 2007 Posts: 14 Location: Italy

Hi!

I want to set up a Gentoo box on the following system: amd64, opteron dual core 2ghz, 2gb ram. Since I was a little bit curious and wanted to try out for myself I chose JFS as a root fs.
But now as I'm recompiling my toolchain it seems very very slow and that makes me think a bit. I mean, Gentoo is much about compiling programs and if JFS (apparently) performs so bad, I doubt it would make a good root fs. I didn't really take the time of toolchain compilation, but it should be much faster.
So, I was also considering XFS. Is this one recommendable for my system? And much compilation? Or should I go for the usual (and good) reiserfs3.6? Some posts here on the gentoo forums argue that also ext3 kicks ass with some fine tuning.

Thanks a lot for your attention!
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frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

I use XFS and have no problem with performance. However, I'm not sitting next to my filesystem with a stopwatch to check performance. XFS certainly isn't an optimal solution for tons of very small files; reiser is about the only fs I know of that goes to great lengths in order to treat these mini files efficiently. I ran a small test recently, with a 4GB reiserfs partition and a 4GB XFS partition, both formatted with standard settings; I could store about 20 copies of the portage tree on the reiserfs partition, whereas the XFS partition would only fit 7 or 8 whole copies. This is a worst case scenario - tons of small files, and XFS has more overhead per small file than does reiserfs. reiserfs is also more performant in handling them.

Still, I'm sticking with XFS... my system is running on XFS only for years now without a single problem, so it earned my trust, and besides I've grown to like their userland tools a lot (dump, restore, debug, even defrag a mounted file system if you like, ...).

devnull42 · n00b Joined: 24 Feb 2007 Posts: 14 Location: Italy

I see.. Now I'm trying with XFS, but it doesn't seem faster.. Maybe it's an issue with the SATA drive itself.. I saw some post on this forum about this specific problem with sata devices slowing down some things, but they are something like a year old.. things should have changed, should they?
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don4lfonso a.k.a. devnull42

~ I'm going to prove the impossible really exists ~