Re: Best File System for partitions over 600GB

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 11:43:16AM -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:

I personally am a fan of XFS. However, it is also possible to use ext3
on large partitions, as you point out. At work, I have a production
server (running RHEL, unfortunately) which is serving up a 6 TB

Why unfortunately? Do Linux fans have to hate other distros as well
as MS?

Ever worked with RHEL or Fedora (or Red Hat before that)? They have
their very own little RedHat-specific way of organizing /etc. Many of
the things that they do go against pretty much every other distro
(except for those which specifically try to emulate RedHat).

I don't hate RHEL. I just hate some of the broken defaults.
Additionally, they have *Enterprise* right in the name, but don't have
out of the box support for any filesystem other than ext2/3 (except for
maybe ReiserFS, but I would hardly call that enterprise quality). I
currently have a server in production which (because of where it is
located and the security policies of the organization/facility where it
is located), must run RHEL3 or RHEL4. Before I rebuilt it using RHEL4,
it was using RHEL3 to serve up three volumes from two external RAID
trays via NFS. It had to be three different volume because under RHEL3,
the biggest filesystem that could be supported out of the box was 2 TB
(because of 2.4 kernel and some other userland utility limitations).

I rebuilt that machine using RHEL4 so that the users would only need to
access one volume. Since I knew that right off the bat it would a
single volume of about 6 TB and that we would later want to add more
storage, I went looking for the XFS or JFS packages on the install CDs.
When I couldn't find them, I went into the #rhel channel and asked
around in there if anyone knew why RHEL did not support XFS or JFS. The
responses I got were along the line of, "ext3 is fine for everything."
To which I replied, "what about for filesystems over 8 TB?" Of course,
the answer to that was "build a cluster with GFS."

Ordinarily, I would just get the sources to the kernel and the
associated userland tools and build them myself. But, security at this
place would simply not go for it. So, in short, they make the life of
the admin exceptionally difficult if you want to do something which they
(the RHEL designers/developers) did not think you would want to do.

filesystem. I took to reading up on ext3 and judiciously set things
like the block size and some of the other filesystem parameters so that
crash recovery would not take ages and so that performance would be a
bit better. Of course, since Debian supports both XFS and JFS quite

Care to share your insights? Or at least pointers where one may
obtain similar insights? Those of us who use ext3 would appreciate
any distillation of the information.

There is a ton of information about JFS and XFS on the net. All you
need to do is check the Wikipedia filesystem comparison page or Google
search for filesystem comparisons. The short of it is:

ext3 - good general purpose FS (not the best performance, but stable)
xfs - excellent performance with huge files and huge filesystems
jfs - similar to XFS but I think it has better performance when under
heavy I/O load
reasierfs - good with lots small files and when you don't really value
your data (not that well understood)

Regards,

-Roberto

--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

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