Filesystem overhead

bscott at ntisys.com bscott at ntisys.com
Wed Jul 30 20:44:26 EDT 2003


On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, at 7:12pm, gaf at blu.org wrote:
> Probably, the best thing that ext3 has going for it is its compatibility
> with ext2.

  Yah.  I would also go so far as to say that EXT3 is the most robust (in
terms of implementation) journaling filesystem available on Linux.  Not
because XFS or Reiser suck (they don't), but simply because EXT2/3 has been
around on Linux longest, and the people maintaining it are in a position to
be the most familiar with Linux.  The maintainers are also *very*
conservative, which can be a Good Thing when you're talking about code
stability.

  ReiserFS doesn't suck.  It also has some things EXT3 doesn't have, like
better handling of large directories.  We've got a customer with a 550 GB
ReiserFS filesystem they've had for well over two years, and it has never
given us any trouble.  (We picked ReiserFS because 2.4 wasn't stable at the
time and XFS (which also handles large directories well) wasn't available on
2.2.)

> ReiserFS has some advantages is that they optimize small files so less
> space is wasted.

  Yah, ReiserFS calls them "tails".  Mounting with tails turned off is a
standard practice for many, though, since they tend to really drag down
performance.  At least in the current implementation.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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