On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Ruediger Meier <sweet_f_a@gmx.de> wrote:
On Wednesday 23 October 2013, Greg Freemyer wrote:
"Carlos E. R." <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:
On 2013-10-23 12:59, David T-G wrote:
Any thoughts, shy of religious warfare, on the best FS to use for a
data
and archive server? [I promise this is it for me for today ;-]
XFS?
10 years ago I researched the same question and chose xfs. I've followed both xfs and ext3/ext4 development since then and would still pick xfs of the 2 (for the described workload).
XFS is _extremely_ slow when creating/deleting files, AFAIR something about factor 100! worse than the ext family. That's why I would not used it for (rsnapshot) backups and most other use cases.
I think you recall from 2003 not 2013! As 18 months ago, the delta was almost gone. At that time Dave Chinner (one of the core XFS developers) was argueing that he only saw a multi-year future in XFS and BtrFS. As such his argument was people should move to XFS if they wanted short term stability because it was going to be around and well supported for years. Then for desktops and small servers, migrate them to BtrFS when it was ready. I'll let you read some of it yourself:
From <http://lwn.net/Articles/476565/> Dave Chinner says:
==
to summarize how I understood you: you recommend using XFS for "big storage" systems, while -- for the time being -- the desktop use-case is still better served by ext4?
No, that's exactly the opposite of what I am saying. My point is that even for desktop use cases, XFS is now so close ext4 performance on single threaded metadata intensive workloads that it ext4 has lost the one historical advantage it held over XFS. The example I use in the talk is untarring a kernel tarball - XFS used to take a minute, ext4 about 3s. That's one of the common "20x slower" workloads that people saw all the time. Now XFS will do that same untar in 4s. And the typical 50x slower workload was then doing a 'rm -rf' on that unpacked kernel tarball. XFS has gone from about a minute down to 3s, compared to 2s for ext4.... While these XFS numbers are still slightly slower from a "benchmark perspective", in practice most people will consider them both to be "instantaneous" because they now both complete faster than the time it takes to type your next command. IOWs, users will notice no practical difference between the performance of the filesystems for common desktop/workstation usage. Let's now fast forward a few months: your desktop and server system filesystems will be BTRFS, whilst XFS is fast enough and scales well enough for everything else that BTRFS can't be used for. I can't see where ext4 fits into this picture because, AFAIC, XFS is now the better choice for just about every workload you wouldn't use BTRFS for.... So I'm not sure ext4 has a future - ext4 was always intended as a stop-gap measure until BTRFS is ready to take over as the default linux filesystem. This milestone is rapidly approaching, so now is a good time to look at the future of the other filesystems that are typically used on systems. Everyone knows what I think now, so I'm very interested in what users and developers think about what I've said and the questions I've posed. The upcoming LSF workshop could be very interesting. :) Dave. ======= -- Greg Freemyer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org