Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Robert Crawford <flacycads@cox.net>]

On Sat November 26 2005 11:48 pm, Thomas Harold wrote:
> Colin Copley wrote:
> > Hi List,
> >
> > Any comment on the best filesystem to use for Gentoo running  a
> > webserver, I prefer more speed and less journaling, is there a standard?
>
> Probably can't go wrong with ext2 (personally, I'd still go with ext3
> because you get faster fscks during bootup, right?).  Ext2/ext3 have
> been around for a long time, there are lots of tools written to work
> with them, supported in most (all?) linux distros.
>
> I'm sure there are good arguments for using Reiser, XFS, JFS, etc, but I
> haven't gotten comfortable enough about them to make the switch away
> from ext2/ext3.

For a server, I'd stay away from reiserfs, as it does appear to have serious 
fragmentation over time- this is becoming more and more apparent. Check this 
thread out on Gentoo forums- I posted links to a lot of good info.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-401591-start-0.html

With ext3, you might want to set the dir_index feature when you format, as 
this allows diretory B=Trees to be used, and really helps with the big 
performance drawback this FS has. This might be your best bet for a 
webserver- rock solid, really good speed (with the dir_index option), and 
virtually no fragmentation over time.

If you deal with lots of really large files, xfs might serve your circumstance 
better, as it performs much better. It really depends on what you are using 
your system for, and what types of files/directories reside on each 
partition. For example, reiserfs (and R4) do much better than the others with 
lots of really small files. But as stated, plan on doing periodic "tarball 
partition and save on another media/reformat partition/copy back all data" 
procedures to defrag the reiserfs partition to maintain top performance. 
There is as yet no decent "repacker" for reiserfs that I know of.

This is contrary to what most people believe about all Linux file systems, but 
for reiserfs, this is becoming an accepted fact. It  does get seriously 
fragmented over time, though probably not as quickly as a FAT or NTFS windows 
partition.

Robert Crawford (wrc1944- on the forum)
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