Filesystem overhead

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Wed Jul 30 17:23:56 EDT 2003


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Jerry Feldman wrote:
| On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 08:35:16 -0400
| "Andrew W. Gaunt" <quantum at lucent.com> wrote:
|
|
|>Very cool, that was revealing. Perhaps this discussion
|>can evolve into  how  journalling (e.g. ext3, etc.) works
|>and why it is good/bad. Anybody?
|
| I would like to see some real metrics on:
| ext2
| ext3
| JFS
| XFS
| ReiserFS
|
| In the cases of all the journaling file systems, the big gain is when
| rebooting after an improper shutdown.
|
| I personally use Reiserfs and have had no problems with it except when I
| had a bad memory chip in one of the laptops. I had to do the reiserfsck
| from a rescue disk, but it worked fine.
|
| The main tradeoff is run-time performance, but for the most part that is
| a good tradeoff unless your system needs all the I/O performance it can
| get. In my specific case I have a couple of filesystems I keep unmounted
| except when I do nightly backups.


I favor running a journalling FS.  You're much less likely to get
corruption from a crash.  If you do crash, your system will come up
faster.  The performance hit is negligable.

I've used ReiserFS in the past on my laptop.  I favor ext3 nowadays.
It's supported by most rescue CDs and can be used as an ext2 FS.  The
ext2 tools (fsck, resize, etc) are very well developed and tested.  I've
been using ext3 on LVM partitions on top of 2 IDE drives in a RAID-1
setup.  Resizing works very well with ext3 for me.

If speed is of utmost importance, check out the others.  I think ext3
lags the others a bit.

I think XFS has better support for ACLs and large files.  Does SAMBA use
the ACLs to better emulate a windows file server's permissions, etc?


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