[rescue] Filesystem choice for fileserver?

[Jonathan Groll]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:34:07AM -0400, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > XFS really excells with large files. Here you'll find its performance
> > to be way faster than ext3 and maybe even faster than reiserfs.
> 
> It's not bad, but I've seen data loss with it.
> 
> On the other hand, we've never had data loss in the same environment at 
> work with an ext3 filesystem (at least where a hardware failure wasn't 
> to blame).  I don't think I've ever had any real problems with ext3, 

Another thing to consider: it seems to me that different filesystems
report significantly different amounts of available space.

For instance, in the test that I've done below, for a 100M disk image
file, I get 87M available space for ext3 and 68M for reiserfs(3). I
was under the impression however that the situation was reversed for
larger disks.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Test:
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.35582 seconds, 77.3 MB/s
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ yes | mkfs.ext3 test
mke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
test is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=1024 (log=0)
Fragment size=1024 (log=0)
25688 inodes, 102400 blocks
5120 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=1
Maximum filesystem blocks=67371008
13 block groups
8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group
1976 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        8193, 24577, 40961, 57345, 73729

Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (4096 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 36 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ sudo mount -o loop test /mnt/
[sudo] password for jonathan:
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
<snipped>
/exports/test/test     97M  5.6M   87M   7% /mnt
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ sudo umount /exports/test/test
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ mkreiserfs -f test >/dev/null
mkreiserfs 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)

test is not a block special device
Continue (y/n):y
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ sudo mount -o loop test /mnt/
jonathan at speedy:/exports/test$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
<snipped>
/exports/test/test    100M   33M   68M  33% /mnt