Re: [gentoo-user] Ext4 another thread

[Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org>]

On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 12:49 -0600, Harry Putnam wrote:
> I didn't want to derail the existing thread discussing ext4 with this
> angle ... I'm guessing there may be comments that will not be helpful
> to that OP.
> 
> I'm wondering what people running ext4 are seeing in practice that
> makes it better than ext3 or reiserfs? Is it safer journalling? Faster
> read/write? ...
> 
> I've thought about switching over too... especially every time I
> `rm -rf' something big and it seems to take way longer than I'd like.
> 
> (I run all reiserfs except ext2 for /boot)

Well it's new and new is always interesting (in good ways and bad ;).

Large writes/deletes will be faster.  If you don't do (a lot of)
writes/deletes of large files then you won't notice (as much).  Extents,
better allocation/deallocation methods, and other added logic further
makes improvements on files (esp large files).  It will eventually
support much larger filesystems and subsecond timestamps for those with
the need.

Depending on your usage you might see significant improvements or hardly
any at all.  Best way to know for sure is to try it out.  Note however
that on ext4 journal checksums are *on* by default (and off on ext3
iirc). So when you are comparing performance you should make that value
the same for both for a fair comparison.