> I finally figured out my slowdown problem: I had somehow turned off > write-caching on the 3Ware controller. Hoo-Boy! Does that kill > throughput! What the heck is that option for anyway? For cases where you do not want to lose your data when you get a blackout. If you do not have a battery power backup for your cache, you will lose data that is in the cache that has not been committed to the disks. > > Here are a handful of bonnie++ benchmarks, I decided to just quote the > block write and block read numbers: > > MB/Sec > Write Read > XFS: 231 202 > ext2, dir_index: > 221 205 > ext3, dir_index, data=ordered: > 80 196 > ext3, dir_index, data=writeback: > 95 199 > ext3, data=writeback: > 95 201 > > As you hinted, ext2 has almost the same performance as XFS. > Data=writeback on ext3 helps some but not a whole lot. Dir_index doesn't > seem to do a thing. Indexes directories are only useful for cases where there are thousands of files in a directory and you want to access a single file (and you know the name in advance) quickly. > > I'm really torn here. I can make use of the extra write speeds of ext2 > or XFS. But is XFS stable and supported enough for 'production' use? > Will I regret a forced fsck on a 1TB ext2 volume? Are you using the no write cache flag with bonnie++? Otherwise you may not get the same results from whatever it is that you are running. > > Steve, you say you've been happy with XFS for a few years. Have you been > using it under any kind of load? Run XFS without write caching and you should be safe. Are you creating thousands of files?