Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2886 mails)

[David Benfell <benfell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002 15:56:40 +0100, Praise wrote:
> 
> There is some disadvantages switching from ext2 to ext3? 
> For example, will any ext2 resizing tool resize ext3?
> What about performance? (I havent been looking around yet).
> 
In theory, yes, you will take a performance hit when switching from
ext2 to ext3.  Journalling inevitably means more disk activity.

The advantage arises when you are rebooting and don't need to spend
hours fscking a large disk and when you don't lose data.  (I upgraded
to ext3 over the weekend after I lost my mail filtering configuration
to a power failure.)

As I was messing with partitions and all that, I also changed one of
my unused partitions into an additional swap partition, in preparation
for a planned memory addition.  So what I'm going to say about
perceptible performance may be skewed.

What I've seen so far seems to be an improvement in performance,
particularly with the problems which seem to be associated with the
virtual memory management problems in the 2.4 kernels.  Like I said, I
added a swap partition, so there's no way to know how much of this is
due to adding a swap partition and how much was due to switching to
ext3.

As for resizing, I would expect that the resizing tool should operate
on an unmounted ext3 partition just as it does an ext2 partition.
Let me introduce Stephen C. Tweedie, the developer of ext3.  Here's
what he says on the subject:

http://www.linuxarkivet.nu/mlists/ext3-users/0112/msg00125.html

Use parted.

-- 
David Benfell, LCP
benfell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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