XFS Best Practices

[Eric Sandeen]

Jeff Flowers wrote:
> I am going to use XFS on a Arch Linux box and I am looking for ways to
> maximize XFS performance. According to an article I have read [1],
> best XFS performance was reached with a file system formatted with a
> 64MB log and mounted with 8 log buffers and atime disabled. But I am
> curious, from the prespective of the XFS experts of this list, if this
> is still good advice and if it is still relevant, as this article was
> published in 2003.

Based on the information you've provided about the performance issues
you're seeing with your particular workload (i.e., nothing), the
existing defaults are perfect for you.  :)

> Also, I have seen a few people recommend turning off the internal
> buffers of hard drives (via hdparm) when using a file system like XFS.
> Good advice?

When drive write caches lose power it may lead to inconsistencies in a
journaling filesystem like xfs, which relies on data hitting the disk in
a certain order, more or less.  By default xfs issues barriers to
enforce this ordering; this has the effect of flushing the write cache
to make it safe.  In some cases disabling barriers and also disabling
write cache may be a good choice.

If you "never" lose power (good ups?) then write caching is safe even
w/o barriers.

-Eric

> Thank you!
>