carlopmart wrote:
Kwan Lowe wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 10:47 AM, carlopmart carlopmart@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Recently I have installed a centOS 5.4 server to use as a home NAS server. I need to use large files (8GB minimum) inside of it to serve via iSCSI services. Which filesystem do you recommends me to reach maximum performance: xfs, ext3, ext4, gfs2 ....??
I don't know if this is still true, but when I last checked a couple years ago, the recommendation was for LVM device backed iSCSI targets.
http://osdir.com/ml/linux.iscsi.tgt.devel/2008-09/msg00000.html
With LVMs you'd of course lose the flexibility of file-backed targets and the ability to do sparse files are you're intending..
dd if=/dev/zero of=iqn.2009-12.com.mydomain:storage.disk01.foo.foo bs=1 count=0 seek=16G
LVM was my first option and performance it is very very good with iSCSI, but backup and restore it is a problem with LVM. For these reason I need to use large files on this server...
Doesn't sparse file use leave you in danger of (a) overcommiting the actual available space, and (b) badly fragmenting the on-disk locations when the space is actually allocated? I think xfs has some support for allocating sparse space at creation time without waiting for real writes, but I don't know how to use it.