[vox-tech] Filesystems on linux for kids.

[Ted Deppner]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 08:08:29PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> i don't really see why any home user would stick with ext2.  if you want
> a headache, i'd use reiserfs just because benchmarks say it's faster for
> the home user than *stock* ext3.

A few weeks ago on Slashdot there was a story about a comparison between
EXT3 and Reiser... and Ext3 was ahead in most cases.  A quick search
should turn up the links.

I've run both reiser and ext3 in production and near production systems.

Early on (8-12 months ago) reiser was really flakey and NFS problematic.
Recently, they're both very good, very high performance, etc.  Reiser has
a clear win on being "online growable", which is useful in LVM
environments, but EXT3 has a win because any boot disk you have can boot
it ext2 if need be to get a production system back online (not that I've
had to, but you have to be prepared).

I prefer EXT3 at present... 2.5 series has a todo to bring growable EXT3
into reality.  Reiser's tails are a problem for production machines, and
reiser's hashing function(s) allow for file name collisions (rare, but
possible).

A quick note though, all the nifty comparisions you can do for inode
creation, directly listings, etc, fly OUT THE WINDOW when you consider
you're writing twice the data (give or take on small files) to the
filesystem when using a journaling FS.  IMHO, the bandwidth throughput and
drive head movement latency going to journaling is by far the biggest
overhead, and makes these minor speed differences between EXT3 and Reiser
child's play.  (ie, qmail's injection rate drops by nearly 50% going to a
journaling FS)

-- 
Ted Deppner
http://www.psyber.com/~ted/