Hello,
How big? ext3 STILL only supports 32000 directories within a directory. That gets to be quite a problem on large installs.
it is true: Performance goes down on very large directories with ext3. But these cases should be very rare. How often would it happen to store millions of files within on directory? And ext3 unfortunately really only allows 32000 subdirectories (only 31998 to be exactly, because . and .. are counted as well). I hope this will be improvent on newer releases.
However, Redhat ships with only one filesystem: ext3. And their kernel doesn't support anything else (speaking of rhel4, with rhel3 you could optionally load modules to support reiserfs and some other filesystems but root partition had to be ext3).
I really like the speed of XFS or reiserfs. But I also had crashes with them. And while you would be able to restore a lot of data with ext3 by simply reading block by block and its metainformation, you wouldn't be able to restore much once your central b-tree information block is destroyed on XFS or reiserfs.
Regards Marten ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
