[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

[Feizhou]

Nathan Grennan wrote:
> 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?
>>
>  Here is the story, if not somewhat outdated, that I have learned over 
> time.
> 
> XFS, fast, but can fail under load, does XORs of data, so a bad write, 
> as in power failure, can mean garbage in a file. It is meta-data only 
> journaling. Also slow on deletes.
> 
> ext3, works for me. It is meta-data only by default, but does it in s a 
> such a way to minimize the risk much more than other filesystems. Also 
> has writeback mode which is like other filesystems if you are looking 
> for better performance. Also has full data journalling mode, which is 
> atomic and is actually faster than the other two in certain situations.

BTW, data=writeback is no guarantee of a performance boost. However, the 
test was done with 2.4 which also gave data=journal a performance boost 
in certain cases. In any case, Bruce Guenter's testing showed that 
ordered and writeback does not result in any performance benefit at all.

http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04/2.6.5-gentoo/

Check out Jeff Mahoney's views on XFS and ext3.

http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/#comment-28534