I'm looking to facilitate a box for database operations (MySQL?) and have heard that XFS was the journalling fs of choice for large file management. Thanks, Anthony
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 07:33:12PM +0100, Gerhard den Hollander wrote:
* Derek Fountain
(Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 04:07:39PM +0000) On Tuesday 26 February 2002 2:46 pm, you wrote:
I had to compile my own 2.4.10 kernel to get XFS support under SuSE 7.3. Does the 2.4.16 SuSE kernel support XFS?
I would recommened ext3 as a journalling fs. It might not be as fast as reiserfs or xfs (though I haven't seen any real speeddifference between any of the 3 ) but it is (In my experience) much more reliable.
Reiserfs is very good, very fast with small files, but has the occasional oops (esp. in combination with NFS or tar) that crashes the system (hard) and/or buggers up the filesystem completely. StarOffice (5.2) install always kernel paniced on one of my boxes on the reiserfs , but not on an identical box (also with reiser)
I still run it on my home box (which isn't networked) with no complaints.
I haven;t played around with XFS much (and certainly not with any of the latest versions) but found it too unwieldy and not stable enough for my tastes.
I wanted to throw in my experiences here. I've used reiserfs for over a year without any problems, both with NFS (and tar -- how could tar cause a problem?). I also just completed my own rather unscientific tests of the speed of ext2/ext3/reiserfs/JFS all on SuSE 7.3 Pro.
I wrote a tiny C program to read/write files which I then tested on an 8 MB partition each time formatted clean with a different file system. The files were read/copied from this partition which should have increased any performance differences between them. I copied files ranging in size from 342 bytes to 133560320 bytes (entire kernel source archive). I ran each copy mumtiple times and averaged them. I used the time program to print stats on each run. While this was hardly scientific, it did give me some idea of the real world performance. Of course, all tests run on the same PC/hardware and same configuration other than the one test partition. No optimization was done on any of the file systems and the default block sizes (from YaST2) were used.
Here is what I observed from fastest to slowest:
JFS EXT3 EXT2 ReiserFS
The biggest difference on the 133560320 copy -- JFS (avg 49.780s) to ReiserFS (avg 54.066s), an 8.61% difference. Now, this does not agree with other articles I've read that say EXT2 should be fastest since it does not journal. I can't explain why the numbers came out this way.
Even with reiserfs the slowest, I have found it's performance to be fine and it has been quite stable, even with NFS. The JFS site states that you should NOT use NFS on a JFS partition, but I have not tried it.
Finally, I have not used ext3 or JFS for any length of time, so I can't give firm opinions about them, and I haven't done anything at all with XFS yet.
YMMV.
Best Regards, Keith