What is Digg?42 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8What kind of an idiot switches file systems solely based on mount time (unless there is absolutely no other difference, which is definitely not the case here)?
- MellerTime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I find this to simply be another interesting example of how *nix can, in certain circumstances, outmaneuver Windows in flexibility. On a Windows server, you have one filesystem option: NTFS (possibly FAT, if you're funny like that still). On *nix, you have any number of different file systems you can pick from, depending on what meets your needs more appropriately (less CPU usage, faster file handling, journaling, etc. etc.).
As with everything, pick the right tool for the right job (whether it be Windows or a *nix). You just happen to have more flexibility doing that with one platform...
EDIT: I forgot to mention that this was also a very well-written article. It was refreshing to see an article comparing something here on Digg that actually had their facts in order and in impressive detail. He also had his refrences documented, which is even more impressive these days... - imrambi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Don't take this as the holy grail. I have seen many other benchmarks using a different distro that puts EXT3 and ReiserFS on top for small files. Reiser is known to be slower with huge files because of the BTree it uses, but in many respects, that is what makes it faster.
As for the mount and unmount times, who care for a server? For the small set of servers I've put up, I could care less about mount and unmount times, its more of performance, and security. Security is one thing that this person left out. If he is going to recommend a FS for servers, does it support different attributes (append, etc). If it doesn't then it isn't ready for servers.
Also what are his options in his fstab? These can make a big difference in performance. Its interesting article, but not the final word.
http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks/v4marks.html has better benchmarks and more information. Great graph at the bottom. - MellerTime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Creation of the filesystem (mkfs) (all FS were created with default values)"
Shouldn't that answer your question? Whatever mkfs's man page says it will assume if you don't specify otherwise... - SDNick484, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Good article despite no Reiser4 comparisons. It would also have been nice to see the parameters passed to mkfs in order to create each filesystem (eg. block size, bytes per inode, etc.).
- Ginjeet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3same thing im missin: Reiser4 !
- Lucian0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Very informative. I've used ReiserFS and Ext3, but based on these test results I will try out XFS.
- sorti, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm not sure I trust PC hardware to XFS and Reiser. My media server HD's hardware is a 4TB (12x400GB) RAID5 on a 9550SX-12 3ware board, I've had problems in the past with Reiser so for now I stick with ext3.
My biggest problem seems to be kernel drivers for all the hardware my newest server motherboard has on board PCIe gigabit ports that *might* have issues with the 3ware boards (the only PCI boards in the system).
I reboot only to install OS patches so I don’t care how long it takes to check the disk as long as my data is safe. - volcompimp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sorry for being a comment before reading the article offender but I wasn't too suprised w/ the results. I was hopin Reiser would've done better and was disappointed they didn't test Reiser 3 & 4.
- aoeu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Seems like a very beginner article -- all measurements are in one pot, not easily over-gazable.
And what's with the bit-byte mix-up every sentence? I prefer such people be hung by their testicles. Why am I supposed to guess if one means byte with his lowercase 'b'. Plenty of reasons to specify transfer speeds or filesizes in bits, but I have a hunch the author didn''t mean bit most of the time in that article. - burke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Great essay. I would digg twice if I could.
- dojobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Definitely. I have absolutely no faith in Reiser FS. Strangely, the distros list it as stable, but in my experience you would open a text file and find that the body of the file is from another text file. Who knows what it was doing to my non human readable files. I am surprised the machine could still boot.
- antigoogle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i agree
- benplaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm a fan of JFS. It is noticibly faster than XFS and EXT3, and about the same as reiser4
in my home-user use, it seems to have the wonderful stability of ext3, with the speed of reiser4 (which i found to be pretty buggy) - SDNick484, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Whoops, I overlooked that line. I expected the author would try to optimize the parameters since the task of the filesystem was known ahead of time (fileserving). Those parameters can make a significant difference and definitely skew the results.
- drizek, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2read their faq:
"
-Currently the driver does not implement defragging support. So defragmentation applications will neither show fragmentation information nor defragment any Ext2 volume.
-This software does not achieve booting a Windows operating system from an Ext2 volume."
Ya, great alternative you got there... - rageguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Excellent article, I've never had the time to do much comparison of file systems. It reconfirms my love of XFS, I do use ext3 on my laptop though, mainly becuase my laptop tripple boots and http://www.fs-driver.org/ is very useful.
I would of loved to see some other file systems on there though, mainly FAT32 and NTFS. I know they're beyond the scope of the article which is what file system is best for my Debian server, obviously neither of those file systems are suitable for Debian. But it would be interesting to see how they perform against the open file systems. :-) - echimu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Excellent, I use ReiserFS on large squid caching server and ext3 on database server.
- volcompimp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Right on time! I just setup an old a fileserver box and I'm lookin to see which FS I should use for storage once I get my wifi working. I was thinkin about using XFS since I'd heard good things and I'm used to just using Reiser 3/4 (back when I used to use linux, it's been a while). I'll take these results into consideration.
- CptnObvious, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hmm its interesting how ext3 didn't do that well in the tests but it is generally the default filesystem for most distributions. I wonder if ext3 handles power failures better. I wish I had read this a couple of days ago, before formating and installing Linux on my new 300GB harddrive.
- syberghost, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is a good article, but what I'd like to see would be some tests that better illustrate the things a fileserver would really be called on to do:
Multiple simultaneous reads and writes of different small files all over the filesystem, while simultaneously doing a couple of very large file transfers and a backup of the entire filesystem to tape.
This should beat the crap out of every one of those filesystems, as well as all the I/O subsystems, but it represents what a fileserver at a medium-sized business can expect 8-5 weekdays. Well, except the backup; call that a worst-case scenario. You could repeat the test without it if you wanted. - g00ch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@drizek,
there is no need to defragment an ext partition (2 or 3) because of the way it arranges the data, as for not supporting booting windows from it, im not surprised because 1) it's windows and would therefore prefer a ms filesystem, and 2) you have to install the driver after windows is installed.
yeah you could probably slipstream it into an install disc, but that doesnt mean the windows installer will magically know how to handle ext partitioning and formating. - fortezza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> Tommstein by Tommstein 21 hours ago Block/Report this User
> What kind of an idiot switches file systems solely based on mount time (unless there is absolutely no other >difference, which is definitely not the case here)?
Yeah, I would recommend switching girlfriends based upon 'mount' time, but not File Systems. Lower mount time is a plus with gf's, though. - fortezza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This has never been done before...in the last 10 minutes. I seen so many of these file system comparisons I can't look at any more. However, if you haven''t see it before, knock yourself out and read the article. Such a file system shootout helped me choose XFS 4 years ago. I chose it for its great support for large files, and I have dealt with CD/DVD images for a long time, so it is useful to me. Thanks to SGI for donating it to the OSS movement.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, ext3 does have data journaling, not just metadata journaling like the rest (as far as I know). I've never used ext3 though (I'm a ReiserFS man), so I can't say much more about it.
- antigoogle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The scope of the article is too limited!
Firstly, reiserfs is not as mature as ext3,jfs and xfs...
And although ext3 does not perform as well as others, it is the oldest one and a natural choice for most of us. I stick with ext3 on my servers and reiserfs on my desktops.
Note that Red Hat does not offer reiserfs - volcompimp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ya, I knew there was a lot but I thought only certain architectures used certain filesystems at first. I never looked into JFS but after seeing it uses less power and hearing that pvr's use it, it sounds like a good FS to use if I ever decided to use myth tv and get a tuner/encoder card.
- drizek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1that wasnt a very good example. Do you know of a filesystem that can be used for windows as a full replacement for ntfs?
- perral1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1True, grub doesn't work on XFS; however in almost every case /boot, the folder grub needs to access, is on a separate partition, and considering it's only used once (at boot), it isn't exactly crucial for it to be fast (hint: use ext2). You can then build the file system driver into the kernel, and all is well.
-Perral1 - tzahi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2XFS is great, but dangerous. It caches the files in memory longer and so, when there is a power outage or a system failure, more files are at risk. It is recommended that you use UPS in conjunction with using XFS.
- Rudrasksha, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2WOW I Had Know idea that there were that many, I thought it was just NTFS FAT32 HFS and EXt3.
- xaxa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0My university computing department uses XFS for most servers, including about 5 with 7TB arrays (and many more with 1TB or so arrays). They have ext3 for / though, XFS seems to just be on RAIDs and /var. They seem reliable, and one of the systems guys recommended it to me.
- redalert007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I had a very good experiences using Reiser with Debian Etch. Actually I have a Raid5 (4x80GB) with Reiser format, and no problem so far. (with a Pentium III 450MHz)
In production systems, I still keep the old and standard Ext3, on Debian Sarge. - fredinator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1GRUB doesn't work in XFS
- DrDabbles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1One of the problems with benchmarks like this is the fact that readers let their feelings get in the way of the data. Many users use EXT3 because it is based on EXT2, which has a long history in Linux. They claim that this history lends credibility to EXT2's stability. If that were true, I can promise you that UFS, HPFS, or even MinixFS would far surpass EXTx. Sometimes, in order to make way for future usability things need to be reworked.
Personally, I've been a Linux user since 1993/1994. I've used everything from EXT2 on workstations, Minix on embedded systems, Reiser3 and Reiser4, JFS, and even XFS. Currently, I use XFS on nearly every machine I use. There are several reasons for this, but the biggest single is the fact that it's 64bit addressed and extent based. This means I can have _huge_ files, and those files are allocated in a very efficient manner.
One thing that Reiser3 has over other file systems is tail packing. The packing of file data into the actual file system data when a file is small enough. This means small files can be accessed relatively quicker on Reiser3 file systems than on any other file system.
Of course, in traditional Linux benchmark fashion these benchmarks were executed on relatively ancient hardware. If I am looking to build a system, I'm not going to buy a new P2 or P3 system. I'd love to see more energy spent benchmarking on newer hardware. Moreover, comparison benchmarks against other file system environments would be helpful for corporate information. If someone installed Windows Server 2003 on a system and bench-marked the file system to death, then installed Linux on it and repeated the benchmarks I would be a happy man.
In closing, I would love to mention the fact that I love Linux and the environment of choice it creates for users. Granted, many new-to-Linux users will (are) intimidated and/or confused by these choices. However, they are critical for users on the higher end of the learning curve. - rustic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I use ext3 but have used jfs in the past. Ext3 might not be a speed demon in tests, but it has been rock solid for me and has lots of great utilities for it. Great article thought, I am about to take a Linux cert for work and this info is always handy.
- kalisphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I used ReiserFS almost without exception back in 2003-2004. I was impressed with its speed, but one time a brownout led to the loss of all my data (not backed-up because I was but a wee college student with no money at the time). I've used nothing but ext3 since then.
Don't get me wrong -- I think Reiser's a fine FS, and a lot of hard work and good research went into it, but I'm not using Linux for things that require a lot of performance. I prioritize stability and reliability, so I choose ext3 every time.
As far as the other filesystems, I'm sure that they're very nice as well. It seems though that they often lag a bit in terms of stability on non-x86 architectures, and since my server is a Power Mac G3, I just generally stick to the most-proven offering. - Malakin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I can't see people really caring about filesystem creation times but I do find the mount times of Reiser to be annoying and for that reason alone I switched to EXT3 a couple years ago (before that I had just used EXT2). Performance of EXT3 is very good and it has all the support tools that EXT2 had.
- dasnov, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1That was an example. The point being you _can_ have other filesystems on Windows. The parent poster made it sound as if there was no way to use any other filesystem except NTFS and the FAT family.
- dasnov, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2"On a Windows server, you have one filesystem option: NTFS"
Actually you can use many other filesystems on Windows, you just have to get a driver for them. For example ext2: http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html
There are many other drivers too, you just have to search for them. - CharlesDarwin, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2Hope anyone who read this has a UPS! No digg.
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