I haven't played with ReiserFS but from what I've read/heard, my guess
is that it will do small files really well. XFS' directories can
also handle many entries, but ReiserFS with its packing and data in the
inode can handle small files better. But, I don't know how ReiserFS will
do when many processes are hitting the same directory on a multi-CPU
system. XFS has had lots of work done in this area since we have many
customer running old sendmail which does all its file work in the same
directory.
For information on XFS, see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs.
The main design goals of XFS are very large storage, scalability, and
journaling. XFS is much more than just a file system with journaling.
If you are running with several processors and/or pushing lots of large
files/data around, I suspect that XFS will be the best.
In the short term, XFS is still in pre-beta form and beta won't be for a
couple of months, yet. The current schedule has a production quality version of
XFS available later this summer (northern hemisphere).
XFS will have additional capabilities that the other file system you
mentioned don't have such as Direct I/O and extended attributes. At least
I haven't heard that others are adding these.
Longer term, it appears that the Linux community will have a rich set
of file systems available. These can be downloaded and analyzed.
I suspect that there will be some matrix mapping applications/environments
to file systems to show which file system(s) to use for each.
Jim
>
>Hi!
>
>We now have several journaling file systems, like XFS, ReiserFS and
>ext3 (and more I believe, but I would like to concentrate on these
>three).
>I have played with ext3 a few weeks ago, which was oke (easy to install
>and if I unplugged the machine, it was up and running (fine) in no time
>just the way sysadmins like it. :-)
>
>Now it seemes to me that ReiserFS has a larger developer base and aims
>a bit higher than ext3. Is that true? If not, what is the difference
>between ext3 and ReiserFS?
>ReiserFS seemes to be a good choice for spool directories because it
>can handle a _huge_ amount of files (and dirs) in a dir efficiently.
>
>And there is XFS. What is the advantage or disadvantage of XFS compared
>to ext3 and/or ReiserFS? It seemes to me that XFS is a bit less stable
>than the others at this moment. Is that true? XFS exists for some time
>now. Is that an advantage above ReiserFS because it had more time to
>develop itself to what is is now, or is ReiserFS 'better' because it
>doesn't have to carry its history and doesn't have to be backwards
>compatible?
>
>Please enlighten me. :-)
>
> Ookhoi
>
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