Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] filesystems

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 25 November 2008 20:37:13 Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
> Now, since I usually compile software in a tmpfs, I guess the
> filesystem makes nearly zero difference. Video encoding is obviously
> bound by CPU, cache and RAM speed, not filesystem. Web rendering is
> also hardly affected by filesystem . And launching programs means
> mostly reading files, and would reiserfs be significantly faster than
> ext3 for this, specially considering that my system is minimalist and
> the root partition is only 7% used?

I find that in normal use, most filesystems have a large range of number of 
files per directory and the spread of how big those files are. In other 
words, a huge mixture of everything.

reiser and ext both have areas they are very good at but in normal use the 
good and bad performance evens out so you get roughly the same with both 
filesystems. The deciding factor then becomes "which filesystem tools are you 
most comfortable with?" because that's the one you should be using.

There are special cases - if the portage tree is on it's own filesystem, ext3 
does give better performance. 

> So it seems I should not have chosen reiserfs, which has a fame of
> being less safe than ext3, and certainly has less software support
> than ext3. The next time I format my root partition, I will choose
> ext3 (then move to ext4 when it is stable).

As I said in another post, I don't believe that either reiser or ext3 is 
inherently more or less safe than the other. Your upgrade path to ext4 does 
change things, so yeah, you have a perfectly valid reason to switch to ext3 
right away

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com