[PLUG] It's Here!!

Michael Ewan mhewan1 at comcast.net
Wed May 11 04:21:53 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 22:36 -0700, Jason R. Martin wrote:
> >>I use ext2 for the boot partition and reiserfs for everything else.
> >>I've been doing this for over 6 years and I've had zero problems.
> >>Yeah, ext3 has more recovery modes, but most of the recovery CDs can
> >>handle reiserfs and I haven't needed them (recovery CDs) for
> >>filesystem problems, so why mess with success?
> > 
> > 
> > One reason is, if I'm not mistaken, ext3 is a "journaling" file system,
> > whereas ext2 is not.  So there's less chance of corruption, and if you
> > should ever crash, ext3 will not have to scan your partition when you
> > reboot.
> 
> ReiserFS is also a journaling file system, along with jfs and xfs.  In 
> some circumstances (which I can't remember off the top of my head right 
> now) ReiserFS performs better than ext3, but not in a manner that you 
> will be able to notice on a laptop hard drive.
> 
> I believe up until recently ReiserFS didn't support the extended 
> attributes used by SELinux, so I don't know if SuSE Pro 9.3 has a 
> version that supports it.  However, if memory serves me, SuSE doesn't 
> ship with SELinux turned on anyway.
> 
> Jason

Reiser performs better for LOTS of small files, XFS performs better for
VERY large files, ext3 holds the middle ground of performance.  Here's
some numbers from a brief google search for filesystem benchmarking...

           reiser4   reiserfs       ext3        XFS        JFS

copy     33.39,34%  39.55,32%  39.42,25%  43.50,32%  48.15,20%

sync      1.54, 0%   3.15, 1%   9.05, 0%   2.08, 1%   3.05, 1%

recopy1  31.09,34%  75.15,13%  79.96, 9% 102.37,12% 108.39, 5%

recopy2  33.15,33%  77.62,13%  98.84, 7% 108.00,12% 114.96, 5%

sync      2.89, 3%   3.84, 1%   8.15, 0%   2.40, 2%   3.86, 0%

du        2.05,42%   2.46,21%   3.31,11%   3.73,32%   2.42,17%

delete    7.41,52%   5.22,58%   3.71,39%   8.75,56%  15.33, 7%

tar      52.25,25%  90.83,12%  74.93,13% 157.61, 7% 135.86, 6%

sync      6.77, 2%   4.19, 3%   1.67, 1%   0.95, 1%  38.18, 0%

overall 171.28,30% 302.53,16% 319.71,11% 429.79,13% 470.88, 6%

As you can see Reiser4 is the fastest by far and XFS the next to slowest. 
However if you change the test criteria to include very large files,
then XFS will start showing better times.

Add here's an article with enough graphs to make you dizzy, this one checks 
a large number of common tasks against several file systems.
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html








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