I've been using full disk encryption with luks on two laptops for about 2.5 years. One is 64 bit Fedora (upgraded to 12), another is 32 bit Ubuntu (upgraded to 9.10), both were ext3, until recently. I noticed that over time, performance degraded substantially, especially on Fedora, which was put to a heavier use. The laptop has 4 Gb RAM and two 2.5 GHz T9300 CPUs. It was especially unbearable after a reboot. Programs like firefox and thunderbird would take close to a minute to start when ran for the first time after a boot. The boot process was painfully slow, and some Gnome applets (e.g. Tomboy notes, keyboard layout switcher) would fail to load on the first login. I experienced this problem on both laptops. I also use 3 desktops with no encryption and a netbook with ecryptfs on /home, which work fine. All are Dell. The Gnome applets problem seems to be due to slowness of the full disk encryption. I had to log out and relogin to make the applets appear. I tried various boot and mount options and was thinking about switching to ecryptfs (encrypted home). The last thing I tried is to migrate ext3 to ext4. I also converted /home, /usr, /opt to extents, following http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Migrating_a_live_system_from_ext3_to_ext4_filesystem That seemed to do the trick. Gnome applets now load fine on both laptops, and startup time is back to snappy. Is this a typical experience: ext3 performance degradation with time and a much better performance with full disk encryption once ext3 is migrated ext4? _______________________________________________ dm-crypt mailing list dm-crypt@xxxxxxxx http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt
