[SATLUG] choosing a filesystem

[Robert Pearson]

On 1/4/07, Alex Bartonek <bartonekdragracing at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'll have to take a look at xen.   I wonder if anyone
> has played around w/reiserfs v4?  supposedly the
> fastest fs?

You might want to define "fastest"?
Usually this means fastest at writing to the disk.
On a busy Storage system this may not be as important as people think
when weighed against other needs.

According to both "LVM HOWTo" and the "OSS SGI Project",
LVM cannot shrink an XFS Filesystem nor a JFS Filesystem.
They can all be expanded.
These may be important considerations for an environment.
[note to myself]: I need to put this out on the Wiki in a neat little table...
<<http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/reducelv.html>>
<<http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#resize>>

In my benchmarking experience the XFS file system was the fastest I
ever saw but you had to have the hardware to drive it.
Those tests were all done on SGI hardware. I have not run those tests
on PC based hardware. There are other considerations now. Like where
are you going to be able to get updates, upgrades and bug fixes for
both XFS and ReiserFS?
This is one reason for the shift back to ext3.

The real home run is to be able to use ZFS but it appears it is not
ready for Linux "Prime Time". It is being run on Linux but not native.
ZFS solves all sorts of administrative problems. It is the sys admin's friend.

There is a benchmark of ReiserFS v4 on the SATLUG Wiki under "File
Systems" that points to this URL:
<<http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz>>

The above URL is for Part 2 of a two part benchmark. Part 1 is on the
Wiki page as well.
<<http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html>>

Justin Piszcz may have updated his results.