Filesystem for /usr/portage

[vh4x0r]

Hi, I'm installing a new gentoo system on my laptop , and need some help with choosing a filesystem for /usr/portage. Should I choose reiser4 or ext4, or maybe ext2 will be faster? Also can somebody help with the mount options?

[d2_racing]

Ext3 or reiserFs4, ext4 is still experimental.

[vh4x0r]

well, which is gonna be faster, ext3 or reiserfs?

[d2_racing]

ReiserFS, because /usr/portage have a lot of small files.

[yngwin]

I recommend Reiser4.
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[mandas]

Check out this, it might help.

http://www.nabble.com/Recommendation-about-faster-(not-smaller)-filesystem-and-blocksize-combination-for-portage-tree-td22781217.html

D.

PS. I recommend ReiserFS

[d2_racing]

With small files and I mean a lot, ReiserFS is the best FS out there I think.

[Ormaaj]

[tranquilcool]

played around with btrfs+compression for some but i have just
gone back to reiser4+compression. no benchmark but i had the
impression performance on btrfs didn't equal reiser4 after a while.
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[gentoo-dev]

ext2 with 1K blocks. Simple, clean, fast.

[djinnZ]

squashfs on xfs, reiser 3 is stable but suffer of fragmentation issues for portage (or you can format the portage partition at slowdon).
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[yngwin]

[yngwin]

[i92guboj]

For me it'd be ext2, with 1k blocks, yes.

There's nothing that justifies the extra cpu load of a journal on a fs where there's nothing really valuable that you can't get back with a sync. But this much depends on your machine. I don't usually have available last generation hardware, and cpu is a valuable resource for me, so I try to save every cpu cycle that I can.

I really laugh when people seem that worried about the speed of the portage partition. It's a nonsense taking into account that compilations can last hours. Who cares if a search operation takes 4 more seconds?

[frostschutz]

I use ReiserFS for /usr/portage, /usr/src, /var/tmp/ccache, /var/tmp/portage.

It's great for tons of small files, much better than XFS (which is what I use for everything else).

For searching a package I just use eix.

ext2 with small blocks sounds good too, but you have to be careful with extX in general... you run out of inodes, it's over for you, only solution (apart from deleting files) is reformatting this time with more inodes. There's someone every day in the #gentoo channel with exactly this kind of problem.

[djinnZ]

[coolsnowmen]

I have had reiserfs for /usr/portage for about 9 months now. And every couple weeks I get strange I/O errors on a sync. This forces me to unmount it, fsck it, and remount it, then sync again. I don't have any other problems with the other filesystems on the disk (ext4 and ext2).

And as far as the "lots of small files" argument. It doesn't really hold true because /usr/portage doesn't have lots of files per directory. It only has a couple small files, so I don't see any massive speed boost you would get vs. ext2 that would make it worth the problems I have with it.

So, by my experience, I would not recommend it.
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[DONAHUE]

2 reiserfs /usr/portage each has ~139896 items, totalling ~3.6 GB and neither has had an error on a sync in 3 years of life.
mileage varies.

[frostschutz]

[John R. Graham]

[coolsnowmen]

[pigeon768]

[djinnZ]

reiserfs 4 is unstable (reported usable but not stable), this is a fact, reiserfs 3.6 is really stable (more than ext3 in my experience) and the better choiche for /var/tmp IMHO (and I use it, not only xfs on the computers of mine).
You speak about reiserfs but what is the version?

The xfs partition on the pc of mine host directly only the ebuilds written by me, all the files are ever bigger than 10 MB and are only tar archives and squashfs images. All the ebuilds are on squashfs not on xfs.
And the content of /usr/portage/distfiles can be downloaded (but some are really painful as the damned multiple java versions from 1.3 to 1.6 than i need) but is a large amount of data so i will be sure (and never will use an unstable filesystem) and reiser is not the better choiche for this.

In the case you have two separate partitions, one for /usr/portage and one for /usr/portage/distfiles, the fragmentation and the performance degrade will not be a problem.

uh, i have forget to say than i use to sync from mirrors on a separate directory (hosted on reiserfs) in the server and later I update the portage on the other computers, in order to prevent mistakes (and copy a file directly is more useful than update it via rsync in a local lan) and errors (the others pcs are not able to sync).
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[BitJam]

I've tried several different file systems for /usr/portage over the years. I'm currently using XFS with the smallest blocksize possible. I can typically sync in well under two minutes. If I sync regularly, the time goes down to about one minute. IMO the small block size outweighs almost all other factors because it reduces the disk I/O (due to all the tiny files). My /usr/portage partition is using 346M according to df -h. I suggest using the FS that has the smallest blocksize. But don't use Reiser-3. It does not fragment gracefully and quickly slows down to a crawl.

If syncing starts to slow down then I copy, erase, and repopulate which works to de-frag. I do this maybe one a year or so.

[frostschutz]