Re: ReiseFS vs XFS

From: Malcolm Lalkaka (mlalkaka_at_gmail.com)
Date: 09/25/05

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    Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 12:59:29 -0700
To: Daniel Garcia <danitous@yahoo.es>

    On 9/25/05, Daniel Garcia <danitous@yahoo.es> wrote:
    > Hello,
    >
    > I would like to know wich is the best filesystem to
    > use: the ReiseFS or XFS. Is it possible to do a whole
    > installation of the Debian system (testing) with XFS.
    > I will use the netinst ISO.
    >
    > Thank you
    > Daniel

    It really depends on what you want to do:

    ReiserFS is faster than ext3 ONLY for files under 4kB. In such a case,
    you can expect to experience faster speeds than ext3 by a factor of 10
    to 15. "This is of great benefit in Usenet news spools, HTTP caches,
    mail delivery systems and other applications where small file
    performance is critical." If you use ReiserFS, use a kernel that is
    newer than 2.6.2, since the ReiserFS on older kernels had problems.
    ReiserFS, also known as Reiser3, is no longer in development, other
    than security updates and critical bug fixes. This is because ReiserFS
    will be superseded by Reiser4. Currently Reiser4 has not been merged
    into the mainstream Linux kernel, although this is the developer's
    (Namesys) first priority.

    XFS (developed by SGI) is also good, since it allows you to do
    online-resizing; but ReiserFS allows you to do this as well, and so
    does ext3 (all three only allow you to grow your partitions, not
    shrink them). Also XFS allows you to do online-defragmentation.
    However, XFS is known to suffer from "out-of-order write hazards".

    If you're going to use ext2, you may as well use ext3 (developed by
    Stephen Tweedie), which is essentially ext2 with a journal. This makes
    it more reliable than ext2, but at a slight cost of speed. This small
    cost in speed is worth it, in my opinion. It is very hard to recover
    deleted files on ext3; but this can be a good thing or bad thing,
    depending on its purpose. Unlike XFS, fragmentation isn't considered
    an issue on ext3, so you won't need to defragment ext3.

    To summarize, if you are going to run a system that will deal with
    small files, less than 4kB in size, then use ReiserFS. Otherwise, I
    would use the ext3 filesystem. XFS is good, but I'm not sure what it
    offers that ReiserFS or ext3 doesn't offer. I personally use ext3, and
    the performance and reliability is great. I use ext3 because many
    files of mine are larger than 4kB, in which case ReiserFS would not be
    the better choice. Furthermore, the convenience of not requiring
    defragmentation is a major advantage of ext3.

    I hope this helps. All the information in this email was acquired from
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_filesystems and the
    associated links. The quoted material is also from this webpage or
    from pages linked to it. Please refer to the page if in need of more
    informative material.

    Malcolm
    mlalkaka@gmail.com
    --------------------------------

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