[CentOS] Is ext4 safe for a production server?

Christopher Chan christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk
Tue Dec 8 03:46:41 UTC 2009


Florin Andrei wrote:
> John R Pierce wrote:
>> I've always avoided XFS because A) it wsan't supported natively in RHEL 
>> anyways, and B) I've heard far too many stories about catastrophic loss 
>> problems and day long FSCK sessions after power failures [1] or what 
>> have you
> 
> I've both heard about and experienced first-hand data loss (pretty 
> severe actually, some incidents pretty recent) with XFS after power 
> failure. It used to be great for performance (not so great now that Ext4 
> is on the rise), but reliability was never its strong point. The bias on 
> this list is surprising and unjustified.


Yes. Used XFS for a mail queue and once lost 4000 emails thanks to XFS's 
aggressive caching after a power loss before barriers were introduced. 
However, XFS now supports barriers and so, so long as you do not use lvm 
or you use hardware raid with a bbu cache and thus not needing to use 
barriers, you are safe.

> 
> FWIW, I was at SGI when XFS for Linux was released, and I probably was 
> among its first users. It was great back then, but now it's over-rated.
> 

For sure it is the most complicated filesystem in Linux with the largest 
block code.



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