[gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Colin Copley]

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?
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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Dale]

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?

I don't run a webserver or anything but if you don't want journaling,
ext2 may be good.  I don't think it has any journaling at all.  Of
course, there are a lot of file systems out there to pick from.  I use
reiserfs on all mine and it works well, even when the power fails.  It
also does fine on a Compaq Proliant 6000 server with quad 200MHz CPUs. 
It is a slow rig but I don't think the journaling takes up that much CPU
time.  It always shows 0%.

It's a thought, until a serious guru comes along.  ^_^

Dale
:-)

-- 
To err is human, I'm most certainly human.

 

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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Thomas Harold]

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.
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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Robert Crawford]

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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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Martin Tedjawardhana]

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Have a look at this benchmark http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html and
the interview article http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=69

Someone mentioned that reiserfs slows down after a while because of
fragmentation, to be honest I've been running a quite busy web/file storage
server using reiserfs for more than 1,5 years without any noticeable slowing
down.

On 27/11/05, Colin Copley <cmc.75@btinternet.com> 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?
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Alexander Skwar]

Colin Copley schrieb:
> Hi List,
> 
> Any comment on the best filesystem to use for Gentoo

None.

> running  a 
> webserver,


Ah, that's something, that can be answered :)

> I prefer more speed and less journaling,

Those are no contrasts.

> is there a standard?

No.

I'd suggest, that you do the tests yourself. This will give
you the most reliable data.

To do so, I'd create filesystems containing the data and
use the apache benchmark tool "ab".

Alexander Skwar
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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Alexander Skwar]

Thomas Harold schrieb:
> 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.

Well, who cares about other distibutions? This is a
Gentoo list. OP asks about Gentoo.

Anyway. It'll be hard to find a recent distribution,
which does NOT support all of the available "standard"
filesystems (Reiser 3, XFS, ext2, ext3, JFS and maybe
even Reiser 4).

As far as age is concerned: What's older? XFS or
ext2?

> 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.

Why not? Are there any facts, that makes you think so?

-- 
Alexander Skwar
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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[Petteri Räty]

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Robert Crawford wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

If you serve only static content, you can put your document root to a
separate partition and as such avoid fragmentation because there aren't
any writes happening.

Regards,
Petteri

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Re: [gentoo-user] best filesystem for Gentoo

[kashani]

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?

	Webserving is a general enough case where there aren't going to be huge 
advantages between filesystems. I'd go with ext3, maybe look at some of 
the tuning parameters, and not spend too much time on it. If you find 
yourself running into I/O issues moving your content to a second drive 
or adding more RAM to increase the system cache is simpler and will 
likely offer an order of magnitude more performance than any wacky 
filesystem hack.

kashani
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