Re: XFS worth it?

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 11:52:00PM +0200, Thomas Steffen wrote:
> I have been a satisfied user of the XFS file system for a while now. I
> think I started around 2.5.99, and apart from the fact that Mozilla
> likes to delete its preferences after a crash (not really an XFS
> fault), it always worked very nicely.
> 
> But after my recent AMD64 install, I am not so sure again. These are
> my problems:
> 
> * The log is not compatible between i386 and AMD64.
> * My bug report is sitting in the XFS bugzilla for a week without response.
> * Grub cannot boot from XFS on AMD64.
> * If my system crashes (while I am trying to find optimal performance
> settings), the log is often found to be corruct.
> * Then I have to boot from a different media and clear the log
> manually (when it should mount ro, imho).
> * XFS performance for file creation and deletion is horrible.
> 
> So is it time to switch? I have heard that ext3 made some progress on
> the performance front, I would probably still go for reiserfs 3.6.
> 
> Or what would be your recommended file system?

Well I am planning to switch my server from XFS to ext3 sometime soon,
since I have had the sytem grind to a halt with odd memory allocation
problems in the XFS code a number of times, and had to reboot it,
occationally had to fsck it too.  It has been quite a pain really, and
not at all what I had expected from XFS.  I know there has been a bit of
progress in the XFS code in the latest 2.6 kernels and it does seem to
have gotten better (with 2.6.10 at the moment) but it's not fully stable
yet in my uses (running samba and nfs server of it).

I haven't had any real problems with ext3 (not counting some stupid
things I have done myself which fsck actually managed to recover it
from).  Performance also feels just fine on ext3.  Early experience with
reiserfs 3.6 some years ago entirely turned me off reiserfs 3.6, while
hoping someday 4.x would be better.

Len Sorensen