[CentOS] Is ext4 safe for a production server?

Peter Kjellstrom cap at nsc.liu.se
Mon Dec 7 20:27:36 UTC 2009


On Monday 07 December 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)

I'm sorry for your losses. That said, we've run many servers (100+) using many 
CentOS versions over the years and I don't know of one case of XFS caused 
data loss. For us XFS has always performed well and "just worked".

Our initial reason for using XFS over EXT3 was write performance on certain 
RAID-controllers but lately it's also about scalability (file system size).

> with XFS after power 
> failure. It used to be great for performance (not so great now that Ext4
> is on the rise),

I am looking forward to EXT4, but it is currently a tech. preview (compared to 
XFS "proven for many years")...

Just my €0.02,
 Peter

> but reliability was never its strong point. The bias on 
> this list is surprising and unjustified.
>
> 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.
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