RE: ReiserFS, ext3 (was: 'praise to the debian gods')

["Jeff Bonner" <jeff@integralogic.com>]

> And does anyone have any reason why I should not run reiserfs 
> on the partion where the database will be stored?

First, the usual caveat:  ReiserFS is an "experimental" kernel feature
and as such, you should observe all the normal cautions if this is a
critical production environment.  Also, there is no dump and restore
with Reiser, but then again neither does the 2.4 kernel have it in the
first place. 

That having been said, I think most people would agree that ReiserFS is
mature enough for almost any use at this point, and I'm not aware of any
glaring problems with it.  I don't know that any further stability or
performance would be gained from another journaling filesystem such as
XFS or JFS.

>From what I understand, you can run ReiserFS on any partition, except
swap.  On the other hand, 32MB is reserved for the journal, so it would
be rather wasteful to use it on very small partitions like /boot.

ReiserFS is supposed to be moving towards an extended filesystem that
can be used as a high-performance DB, with advanced query and
transaction support.  This may be of particular benefit in your case,
down the road at least.  For now, the "balanced tree" should give you
performance increases, as much as 15 times that of ext2 (in some cases).

Here's a comprehensive run-down of ReiserFS and journaling:

	http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs.html

You may want to examine 'ext3' as well.  It's backwards-compatible with
ext2; in fact you can simply convert your existing ext2 partitions by
"adding" the journal.  This is done with the tune2fs utility, and by
changing your /etc/fstab.  Then you would run the mkinitrd so your
system starts using it upon the next boot.  Its performance won't be
that of a "pure" journaling system, but the ease of conversion may
mitigate that for some people.  Of course, I should add that ext3 is
also "experimental".

Have a look at this URL for a comparison of ext3's benefits:

	http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs7/

Last but not least, you should understand (if you don't already) the
difference between logging and journaling, namely that the former keeps
track of both data and inodes, while the latter handles only inodes.
Journaling requires less system resources, but logging would recover any
lost data much faster.  Reiser, XFS and ext3 all have options to support
both these methods.

> Once again, debian is GREAT!!!

You won't get any argument here.  ;)

Jeff Bonner