Re: Opinions XFS

On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 07:44:03PM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:  

> I have a MythTV system where there are lots of large (2+ gigabyte)
> video recordings. With ext3, deletes would block all writes to the
> filesystem until they completed, causing skips if there was an
> ongoing recording. With XFS I haven't had any such problems.
>
> I think there's a bit of Not Invented Here syndrome with XFS that
> causes people to be wary of it, but in my experience it's a rock-
> solid filesystem. However, it doesn't journal data, only metadata,
> so you may lose a bit of data if the system goes down uncleanly. The
> filesystem will be protected from corruption, however. (Ext3fs can
> also be configured this way, but its default is to journal data as
> well as metadata.)

I think that this is another reason for having different mount points each with the best filesystem for it. At the current state (history is history), for reliability you probably want ext3, so use that on system filesystems and for storing backups. For high performance, expecially in a graphic environment, use XFS (which makes sense given XFS comes from Silicon _Graphics_), which really shines at handling large files (e.g. movies). For databases, you may want JFS, which is designed for transactional data and handles many small files well too; many databases don't do a sync so a power failure can mess up the data even if the underlying filesystem survives intact, so any loss caused by JFS would be moot.

Based on this discussion, I'll be re-evaluating my current set up. Thank you.

Doug.

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