[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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