Star 'The Future Is Bright for Linux Filesystems'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 10th Jun 2008 13:06 UTC, submitted by sharkscott
Linux "In a recent article, Linux File Systems: Ready for the Future?, Henry Newman expands on what he feels are shortcomings in current GNU/Linux filesystems. Specifically, he believes current Linux filesystem technology cannot meet the demands that massive implementations of 100TB or larger require. He states he received some emotional responses trying to either refute his information or impugn his character, although those comments do not show on either of the article's pages. This prompted me to get the real scoop on how Linux filesystem technology is trying to keep pace with the ever-growing need for storage space."
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RE: and the winner is ?
by panzi on Tue 10th Jun 2008 15:38 UTC in reply to "and the winner is ?"
panzi
Member since:
2006-01-22

How did you measure the performance of your system? Is it just the felt speed? I read a benchmark once which stated that JFS is the fastest Linux filesystem. Even faster than ext2 (and jfs *does* have a journal, ext2 don't). I think this benchmark was linked here on osnews somewhere, but I don't have the link at hand.

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RE[2]: and the winner is ?
by panzi on Tue 10th Jun 2008 15:40 in reply to "RE: and the winner is ?"
panzi Member since:
2006-01-22

PS: I use jfs for /home and other data partitions and ext3 for / because fedora didn't let me choose jfs for that.

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RE[2]: and the winner is ?
by raver31 on Tue 10th Jun 2008 18:27 in reply to "RE: and the winner is ?"
raver31 Member since:
2005-07-06

I rarely trust anyones benchmarks. I prefer real world testing.
It seemed slower doing things like opening Open Office from cold, doing a backup over a network, just seemed slow...

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RE[3]: and the winner is ?
by segedunum on Tue 10th Jun 2008 22:04 in reply to "RE[2]: and the winner is ?"
segedunum Member since:
2005-07-06

I rarely trust anyones benchmarks. I prefer real world testing.

So how can we verify that daft 'test' that you've done above and reproduce whatever it is that you've actually found? The noatime option you can add for just about any filesystem, so what you've got there means very little, if anything. All it does is eliminate the update of when a file was last accessed (sometimes necessary), which is a huge speed improvement, but I note that you haven't done that for the other filesystems you've bitched about. relatime is probably a safer option, but squashing the atime problem on any filesystem is the biggest thing you can do to boost performance, even over file stripe aligning.

If you think you're describing real world testing then I shudder. I really do.

Edited 2008-06-10 22:23 UTC

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RE[2]: and the winner is ?
by glarepate on Tue 10th Jun 2008 19:42 in reply to "RE: and the winner is ?"
glarepate Member since:
2006-01-04

As you noted ext2 lacks a journal. But, ext3 is the same ext2 filesystem with a journal (it's an mke2fs formatting switch, -j). I have had the data cables connecting my drives to my RAID card come loose at least 3 times and been able to re-attach them and come back up with no [detectable] errors or side-effects. I was surprised by this since the cables came loose during heavy data transfer and not after a 5 to 30 second quiet period where a disk write could save my bacon.

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