[CentOS] NFS filesystem recommendations please (and problems with XFS)

Andreas Micklei andreas.micklei at ivistar.de
Mon Jul 23 13:03:35 UTC 2007


Am Samstag, 21. Juli 2007 schrieb Patrick - South Valley Internet:
> With all this said, I'd like to use XFS, if it indeed is going to be the
> fastest for the solution I want to implement.  If you guys can help me
> get that installed by telling me what I need - great!  If you think XFS
> isn't going to work as efficiently and fast as I want it to, and there
> is another filesystem (such as ext3) that will be more stable and just
> as fast in my setup, I'm all ears.

Just to add some positive feedback: I implemented XFS on an x86_64 box running 
CentOS around here. The machine is an NFS, Samba and Emailserver (kolab, that 
means postfix + cyrus imapd). The machine has a Hardware SCSI RAID with 8 10k 
U320 HDs. So far we had a minor issue with some small undeletable files that 
could be tracked down to a XFS bug (which is fixed by now). Other than that 
the box has been running rock stable. We started with CentOS 4.2 or 4.3 and 
are now at 4.5 via continuous yum updates.

Before the machine went into production I had about two weaks for doing heavy 
benchmarking and some reinstalls. Using XFS and tuning the parameters of the 
RAID array gave a massive performance boost. I also tried tuning ext3 but got 
only about half the throughput than with XFS, so I decided to go XFS.

Of course these results depend on usage pattern, hardware, etc. So do your own 
benchmarks. I myself asked our heavies nfs users for their homedirs or parts 
of it and benchmarked by copying these around in parrallel. This was quite 
enlightening and much more useful than artifical benchmarks.

regards,
Andreas Micklei

-- 
Andreas Micklei
IVISTAR Kommunikationssysteme AG
Ehrenbergstr. 19 / 10245 Berlin, Germany
http://www.ivistar.de

Handelsregister: Berlin Charlottenburg HRB 75173
Umsatzsteuer-ID: DE207795030
Vorstand: Dr.-Ing. Dirk Elias
Aufsichtsratsvorsitz: Dipl.-Betriebsw. Frank Bindel



More information about the CentOS mailing list