[NTLUG:Discuss] Time to switch away from ReiserFS?

[Richard Geoffrion]

Chris Cox <cjcox at acm.org> wrote:


> I have ext3 filesystems that exhibit behavior that is
> UNEXPLAINED.  Yes... they are trashed.  In particular
> it was a RHEL 4 machine.  There are directories where
> you can't create files at a certain depth or lower... but
> you can create files in other trees with equal depth
> on the exact same filesystem (bizarre).  Filesystem
> passes fsck.
>   
>   

I guess everyone's mileage differs.   From my vantage point, I've 
experienced more ReiserFS file system corruption.  I have also 
definitively proved that a corrupt ReiserFS filesystems can hard lock a 
server.   I don't know HOW a corrupt file system containing dirvish 
vaults manages to hard lock the server but with ReiserFS, it can.  Maybe 
it's an interaction between ReiserFS and hardware errors.   I've 
probably said this before but I also have an unacceptable performance 
hit expiring dirvish images (rm'ing huge subdirectory structures 
containing tens of thousands of symlinks).  While the disk space savings 
is desirable in a dirvish vault situation, EXT3's speed and reliability 
for that situation works better.



Robert Pearson wrote:
> I stopped using ReiserFS when openSUSE no longer had it as the
> default.

I moved away from ReiserFS after troubleshooting my dirvish-expire 
slowness and file system corruptions causing server hard locks after I 
found the following information during my research. (Yes, I understand 
the information is dated--yet it seems to be the apparent philosophy for 
ReiserFS that stuck in my craw. {what the heck is a craw..and do I 
really have one?})

http://wiki.dirvish.org/index.cgi?ReiserFSConsideredHarmeful

Other internet searches discuss how EXT3 is the slowest filesystem for 
[the default settings of] PostGRES.  I would say things boil down to 
picking the correct filesystem for the application followed by tuning 
both the application and the filesystem to maximize performance.  And it 
is this issue that can cause a love/hate relationship administering 
computer networks.

Isn't there some saying somewhere about how functionality dictates the 
form??  I'm just glad to have several file system options besides 
FAT[16|32] | NTFS.

-- 
Richard
*adds filesystem (one word) to his spell check dictionary