[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

[chrism at imntv.com]

Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 2006 at 4:41pm, Kirk Bocek wrote
>
>> Now that I've been enlightened to the terrible write performance of 
>> ext3 on my new 3Ware RAID 5 array, I'm stuck choosing an alternative 
>> filesystem. I benchmarked XFS, JFS, ReiserFS and ext3 and they came 
>> back in that order from best to worst performer.
>>
>> I'm leaning towards XFS because of performance and because centosplus 
>> makes kernel modules available for the stock kernel.
>>
>> How's the reliability of XFS? It's certainly been around long enough.
>>
>> Anyone care to sway me one way or another?
>
> To a large extent it depends on what the FS will be doing.  Each have 
> their strengths.
>
> That being said, I'd lean strongly towards XFS or JFS.  Reiser... 
> worries me.  AIUI, the current incarnation has been largely abandoned 
> for Reiser4, which is having all sorts of issues getting into the kernel.
>
> I've used XFS for years and had very good luck with it.  And some 
> folks I respect very much here are using JFS on critical systems.  
> Test 'em both under your presumed workload and go with whatever gives 
> you the warm fuzzies.

I seem to have maxed out at approximately 275mb/sec on writes and about 
200mb/sec on reads with the following configuration:

Dual opteron 275's
2gb RAM (4 x 512mb)
3Ware 9550SX w/8 ports
8 x 750gig barracudas (RAID 0)
2 x 80gig seagates for the OS
ncq off
9550 set to "performance" rather than "balanced" on the storsave or 
whatever that parameter was called
ext3 file system with "blockdev --setra 16384"  <-- great find!
CentOS 4.4 64-bit

I'm too chicken/paranoid/etc to fiddle with XFS since I'm cpu bound most 
of the time (encoding/fondling uncompressed video).  At some point, I'll 
switch the array over to RAID5 so there is some sort of safety net, but 
right now I'm working with play data so it doesn't really matter. 

Cheers,