[CentOS] home directory server performance issues

[Matt Garman]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 1:58 AM, Nicolas KOWALSKI
<nicolas.kowalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 11:37:50AM -0600, Matt Garman wrote:
>> OS is CentOS 5.6, home directory partition is ext3, with options
>> “rw,data=journal,usrquota”.
>
> Is the data=journal option really wanted here? Did you try with the
> other journalling modes available? I also think you are missing the
> noatime option here.

Short answer: I don't know.  Intuitively, it seems like it's not the
right thing.  However, there are a number of articles out there[1],
that say in data=journal may improve performance dramatically, in
cases where there is a both a lot of reading and writing.  That's what
a home directory server is to me: a lot of reading and writing.
However, I haven't seen any tool or mechanism for precisely
quantifying when data=journal will improve performance; everyone just
says "change it and test".  Unfortunately, in my situation, I didn't
have the luxury of testing, because things were unusable "now".

[1] for example:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs8/index.html