linux filesystems
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Apr 15, 2008 5:57 PM EDT |
I hope I'm not going to be sorry I asked...! I use all the major Linux filesystems- Reiser 3, Ext2/3, JFS, and XFS- in a rather random fashion in my home computer lair. I've even run various benchmarking apps just for kicks, and haven't noticed anything particularly exciting or dramatic about any of them, which is how I like it. XFS is supposed to be the bee's knees for large files like audio and photos, so I'm thinking of formatting my shiny new photo storage drive in XFS. Thoughts? Horror stories? Happy endings? |
| herzeleid Apr 15, 2008 6:55 PM EDT |
I've heard some users rave about xfs, but hard data has been hard to come by. I did some testing with a quad xeon server at work. The basic benchmarks with iozone and bonnie didn't really show much of a difference, but running dbench at various concurrency levels from 1 to 2048 showed stark differences in throughput and scalability, as well as consistency. Of all the journalled filesystems, the following trends were quite pronounced: 1. xfs had the most consistent throughput, though not the fastest 2. jfs had the lowest cpu usage, but the performance was also quite modest 3. ext3 had odd delays and erratic throughput/performance variation 4. reiserfs was far and away the fastest and most scalable I can probably manage to dig up the numbers if you're really interested. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 15, 2008 10:26 PM EDT |
My benchmarks (to be published Real Soon Now) showed something different: XFS was the best (for my audio collection and backups) but Ext3 came very close. ReiserFS didn't really show it's advantage, even on small files. |
| gus3 Apr 15, 2008 11:18 PM EDT |
I've done a little experiment with Ext3, XFS, and JFS: re-installing kernel source on a Slackware system. It exercises just about every file I/O routine in the kernel. The command: "/usr/bin/time upgradepkg --reinstall kernel-source-2.6.24.4*.tgz" one time, so no cache warming. Ext3 took 45 seconds. JFS took over 3 minutes. XFS took over 11 minutes! I know, the main focus of XFS is fast response for media files, but 11 minutes seems a tad pathological. |
| DiBosco Apr 16, 2008 12:20 AM EDT |
I use XFS on my server on the mount point I store all my large MPEGs and AVIs. It's been very reliable, (IIRC) formatted the hard drive quickly and seems to delete large files *way* faster than ext3. |
| dinotrac Apr 16, 2008 3:07 AM EDT |
Hmmm.
I use JFS as the file system for my Myth files, specifically because it is very fast for large file delete.
These posts point out one thing, though -- different needs, umm, have different needs. Fast throughput is good, but, for multimedia, steady is essential. When you listen to something, you can hear when it hiccups -- even more than when watching something. |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 16, 2008 4:26 AM EDT |
KernelTrap has had a couple of "file system shootout" articles. This is the one that pops up first on Google: http://kerneltrap.org/node/1054 As I recall, differences were not huge, and ext3 wasn't particularly bad in any category. Since it's sort of the "least common denominator" in the Linux world, I figured I'd stick with it. I don't have a MythTV box yet, $$ of course, so the large file delete speed isn't particularly of worry. The one and only time ext3 has choked on me was when I had a power failure as I was shutting down. I think it really did catch the disk in the middle of a write cycle, by sheer luck. Not bad for a laptop in continual random use for 5 years, with lousy batter life and no battery monitor running because it's almost always plugged in. Say la damned vee. |
| tuxchick Apr 16, 2008 8:03 AM EDT |
One thing I would like is faster delete. My photo files are 3- to 11-megabytes, and I'm usually working with batches of several hundred, so when I'm weeding out the stinkers it would be nice if it went faster. I have most of them on an ext3 partition, and it take up to 15 seconds to delete a file. (Yes, it's really 'delete', it took some heroics to persuade Digikam that I really mean delete and not send to Trash. Grrr die stupid Windowisms.) I don't want to mess with Reiser4 because it seems it's still not stable and the kernel team and Reiser team can't figure out how to get along. |
| dinotrac Apr 16, 2008 8:30 AM EDT |
> I don't want to mess with Reiser4 because it seems it's still not stable and the kernel team and Reiser team can't figure out how to get along. Yeah. Getting that worked out could be murder. |
| tuxchick Apr 16, 2008 8:49 AM EDT |
AAARRGGGHH. Mr. dino, go to your room and don't come out until you have repented and reformed. |
| dinotrac Apr 16, 2008 9:41 AM EDT |
Learned to keep liquids away from the keyboard, I see. ;0) |
| herzeleid Apr 16, 2008 10:26 AM EDT |
> I don't want to mess with Reiser4 because it seems it's still not stable and the kernel team and Reiser team can't figure out how to get along. Right, I didn't even look at reiser4 - my testing was with good old reiser3, as shipped with suse enterprise. |
| Sander_Marechal Apr 16, 2008 12:50 PM EDT |
Quoting:One thing I would like is faster delete. My photo files are 3- to 11-megabytes, and I'm usually working with batches of several hundred I'd go for XFS. In my benchmarks on ~4 MB ogg files it's faster deleting than JFS (reading and writing too). Only when I go to the really large files (500 MB+) does JFS become faster at deleting. The real archillies heel for JFS seems to be small files. It was 10 times or more slower than XFS or Ext3 when working with many files of a few KB. Your best bet is to benchmark yourself. That way you can test exactly the workload you're actually using. |
| jezuch Apr 16, 2008 3:09 PM EDT |
XFS delete is fast UNLESS you delete sparse files -- like those downloaded via bittorrent (which usually become terribly fragmented). |
| gus3 Apr 16, 2008 9:18 PM EDT |
An addendum to my non-benchmark above: Per an earlier thread, I did change the JFS drive to use deadline scheduling: echo deadline > /sys/block/[device]/queue/scheduler Something tells me we need a matrix of filesystems and I/O schedulers. At the very least, this will show what filesystems benefit most from different schedulers' default settings. @jezuch: Have you tried "xfs_fsr"? It's the XFS filesystem reorganizer, like "defrag" but done right. |
| jezuch Apr 17, 2008 3:57 AM EDT |
Yeah, I tried xfs_fsr. And later found numerous warnings not to use it because of data loss and of it being unmaintained ;) But I don't really mind the slow deletes. I even like it! I'm a geek with strange tastes, you know ;) I only mentioned it for completness. |
| mary Dec 30, 2008 4:54 AM EDT |
Iam begginer in lunux and I have try to learn it , it become hard, but I like to know , please help me for more ur know in command line. |
| herzeleid Dec 30, 2008 2:15 PM EDT |
@mary - > I am begginer in lunux and I have try to learn it Do you have to learn it for work, for school, or something else? Do you have a computer with linux installed? If so, what exact version is it? What is your goal with linux? Passing a course? Using it professionally? Do you want to use linux full time on the desktop? Is this a change of direction for you, or just a temporary situation? |
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