ext4 and XFS [was: Re: Installer of Debian Stable allows to use btrfs for /, does it mean it's mature enough to use safely?]

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Jul 08, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> > And of those two choices, I would lean heavily towards ext4.  I have seen
> > repeated file system corruptions, kernel panics, and file systems that get
> > extremely slow after heavy usage for multiple months under XFS, and have
> > not seen any of those problems with ext4.
>
> I mostly agreed with this, but then Red Hat switched to XFS as their
> default and I consider this a significant endorsement.
> Nowadays I tend to use XFS for the larger (> 500 GB) file systems.

I did some research on filesystems for the Software Heritage project, and
looked specifically at ext4 versus XFS, based on the theory that XFS handled
large filesystems better.  Turns out that switching from XFS to a (carefully
tuned) ext4 filesystem decreased storage size and significantly decreased
access latency for SWH's massive repository storage.  Not least of which
because ext4's htree directories work significantly better than XFS's
equivalent.

- Josh Triplett