Re: [PLUG] The filesystem question...

[Stephen Brown <sbrown@cubehost.net>]

For your uses on a laptop, unless you are doing something out of the
ordinary like
 - over a few hundred files per directory
 - massive churn in the filesystem (lots of files added and deleted)
 - video (mythtv)
 - or tens of thousands of files per filesystem
I would stick with the simple ext3. It is not as fast as jfs or xfs, but
pretty much any rescue disk you pick up will be able to access the drive
and for a laptop you are not talking about extreme performance storage
anyway.

If you are thinking beyond the laptop to 200G+ filesystems, then you
want to switch to jfs or xfs. At my day job we have had good experience
with both xfs and jfs on filesystems up to 9TB. In our experience ext3
has done well only for mostly static filesystems of small to medium size
(under 50G). Even with dir_index, ext3 is still orders of magnitude
slower than xfs or jfs with directories with hundreds or thousands of
files.

Deletions are much faster faster with jfs, and although it doesn't seem
like a big deal at first glance, simple things like culling out old
files can take hours to run instead of minutes. Best thing is to
experiment and see with your actual usage. We are currently using xfs
for all mid-sized filesystem, and jfs for the real big ones with over 4T
or over 10M files. The only thing that burned us in the past was back
around FC3 they tried to go to 4K kernel stacks, which was not enough
for xfs+lvm+sw raid. Recompiling for an 8k stack in the kernel fixed the
problems up.

- Steve



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