On 16 Apr 2002, Florin Andrei wrote: > On Thu, 2002-03-07 at 07:37, Knut J Bjuland wrote: > > Are Redhat going to include XFS in a rawhide kernel or in Redhat 8.X when it is ready? > > I'm waiting for that since a loooong time. > > In my tests, XFS performed better (in terms of stability AND performance > under heavy load) than ReiserFS and Ext3 for workloads like: databases > (MySQL), Samba and NFS fileservers (and also including here webservers, > 'cause they are fileservers after all, aren't they?) and access to large > files. Have you tried jfs? I found it's fairly good for most things, and the quickest of all for coming back from a crash (you *must* run fsck on it or it won't mount, but I've yet to notice any significant delay from the journal replay). > ReiserFS outperformed it (and everyone else) for proxy servers (Squid). Reiser was optimised for Squid a while back (someone paid for it :o) > Ext3 outperformed it for mail relays (strange, isn't?). I think the way ext3 does its journalling and writing it back improves the performance for typical mail handling (i.e. it makes fsync fast). > For general usage (regular workstations), there are no notable > differences between filesystems. In general use, the effect of caching in memory mitigates well in your favour; you're rarely exposed to raw filesystem performance as such. That's a good thing as all filesystems have some weaknesses (simply because some things are tradeoffs; sometimes the tradeoff is selectable by the user e.g. space efficiency -vs- speed on ReiserFS using the "notail" option). I'd suggest time trialling each of your major uses and choose file system types for each system partition based on the results. You'll probably end up with different choices to mine ;o) > As a matter of fact, i'm using the XFS version of Red Hat 7.2 > everywhere, except laptops and the workloads mentioned above (proxies, > mail relays). > I've seen a case when, by simply changing the kernel from the regular > one to the XFS-enabled one, the system load decreased noticeably, and > the I/O activity became more relaxed (a very busy webserver). > Databases too, perform usually better on XFS than on other filesystems > (only tried MySQL). I also found the "system" load (measured as CPU percentage) very low with jfs, which is currently available as part of the Raw Hide kernel, I believe the kernel support is in the beta kernel as well but they didn't include the jfsutils package which you will need for real life use ... you *need* fsck.jfs in case of an unclean shutdown, but as I noted it's not a big timewaster). The kernel changelog notes that jfs was included "for evaluation" so you would need to check with RH's kernel team if they are confident of including it for the foreseeable [sic] future.
