[tech] A question of File System

[Nick Bannon]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 10:29:14AM -0700, Ian McKellar wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-04-21 at 07:16, David Luyer wrote:
> > Fast for writes... reiserfs if you have small files which grow, ext2 and
> > ext3 are also pretty fast with a small number of files per directory.
> > 
> The big advantage of ext3 over reiserfs is that its just ext2 +
> journalling so its a known quantity. The big disadvantage of ext3 vs
> reiserfs is that its just ext2 + journalling so its slow.

ext2/ext3's certainly not "slow". Directory operations are slow on
large directories. ext3 in full-data-journalling mode is slow at
writes, not that you'd typically run it that way. Both cream Solaris
UFS and Veritas VxFS, generally speaking.

(VxFS certainly has its uses - it can do online resizing for example)

ReiserFS is very fast at directory operations on large directories (not
as fast as ext3+htree, though ::-) ) and large numbers of small files.

> Reiserfs also
> has (at least it will have) some kind of extended attributes system. I
> don't know if/when that'll actually be used in userland.
[...]

That's definitely got some promise. It's kinda irritating at the moment
because it doesn't have the simple ext2 attributes (immutable bit,
etc), but there is or has been a patch to provide that. What it ought
to get at some stage is more generic extended attributes, eg somewhere
to store ACL's for Samba. The equivalent ext2 support for that (
http://acl.bestbits.at/ ) sounds like it's going to go into the kernel
at a leisurely pace. XFS should also be able to do it.

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal