Re: default file system?

[Knut Yrvin <knuty@skolelinux.no>]

onsdag 12. mai 2004, 22:28, skrev Petter Reinholdtsen:
> And to tell you the truth, I do not trust reiserfs.  It will need to
> have several years of real world documented experience on flaky
> hardware before I trust it to not croak on me when I desperately need
> to fetch some files from a disk.

The bad results concerning ext3 was splitting files into small pieces
and making/removing 10.000 directories. ext3 are about 7-10 slower to
do this than ReiserFS. ext3 is pretty good handling large files and
keeps up with the other journaling file-systems in other aspects of
the testes. 

http://linuxgazette.net/102/misc/piszcz/image018.jpg
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html

So the question is how likely it is that 100-250 pupils in a
Skolelinux-network will create or delete 10.000 directories that takes
55-142 second on a Western Digital 250 GB ATA/100 disk on a P III 500
MHz machine (i need to take a breath). I don't believe the pupils
create thousands of directories. More likely they create 2 or 3, and
this has no effect on performance with 250 concurrent users.  We also
recommend servers with SCSI-disks when there are more than 10 users on
a Skolelinux server.

The ext3-issue is important for huge data-centres with thousands of
users. They probably uses one of the other journaling filesystems as
JFS, XFS or Reiser. In such environments they will have many people
employed to take the necessary decisions conserning technical aspects
of the file-systems, and what to use. 

As Harald wrote, there is recovery difficulties with Reiser3. It's
some other technical issues also with resizing LVM and so on. Thats
why we chose ext3 for Skolelinux.

- Knut Yrivn 
The Skolelinux project manager Norway