[CentOS] Largish filesystems [was Re: XFS install issue]

Mon Jun 2 13:12:33 UTC 2008
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Filipe Brandenburger wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Bent Terp <bent at nagstrup.dk> wrote:
>> Interesting, I thought that XFS was fairly safe for use. What would
>> you recommend for filesystems in the 50-500 terabyte range?
> 
> I would recommend you split it in several smaller (2-4TB) filesystems.
> Most applications would support this, and with some clever tactics you
> might overcome this in applications that do not support it directly.
> 
> Disadvantages of using one huge filesystem (independent of filesystem type):
> - If it breaks, you lose *ALL* your data.
> - If you need to check the filesystem (fsck), it will take ages.
> - You cannot easily scale horizontally by moving some of the data to a
> second machine.
> - It's much harder to tell what is causing performance problems.
> 
> I never had any filesystem over 5TB in my life (and I've managed more
> than 100TB at one site), and these days my "sanity" limit is around
> 1TB per filesystem.
> 
> I'm currently using XFS in production (we have some SuSE machines just
> for the support of it), but I've had so many problems that would have
> been avoided if we weren't using XFS, that I'm seriously considering
> migrating them all to ext3. (Bonus points for getting rid of that SuSE
> trash and replacing them with some shiny CentOS 5 machines.)

Are these 64 bit machines?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com