Re: Filesystem Benchmarks (2.6.0-test2)

[Steve Lord <lord@sgi.com>]

On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 19:23, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I don't know how much of a waste of time benchmarks are, but KernelTrap
> is running an article[1] on benchmarks done by Grant Miner (as posted on
> the LKML) comparing the following journalling filesystems for Linux
> using kernel 2.6.0-test2: Reiser4, ReiserFS, ext3, XFS and JFS.
> 
> [1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/715
> 
> The summary of the tests is as follows (not my words):
> 
>      - ext3's syncs tended to take the longest [at] 10 seconds, except
>      - JFS took a whopping 38.18s on its final sync
>      - xfs used more CPU than ext3 but was slower than ext3
>      - reiser4 had highest throughput and most CPU usage
>      - jfs had lowest throughput and least CPU usage
> 
> A comment in the KernelTrap thread that follows is also not very
> reassuring. It's unfortunately by an anonymous poster, though, so I
> guess we take this with more than just a grain of salt. To wit:
> 
>     "Ah, but I lost a couple of filesystems using XFS. Switching back to
>     ext3 on the same machine solved all corruption problems and the
>     machine is still running today. It crashed three times in production
>     as soon as XFS got a little load. Two times it was completly
>     impossible to recover the filesystem with the xfs tools and I had to
>     restore from backup. That turned a two minute reboot process which
>     most people wouldn't notice into a two hour restore process which
>     everybody noticed.
> 
>     "I used to admin Irix systems and I loved them (though I disagree
>     with the commercial "discipline"). And I used to be a big fan of XFS
>     but I think they have some problems to solve before I'll try it in
>     production again.
> 
>     "In short, my using ext3 isn't because it's convenient, it's because
>     it's both a journaled filesystem and it has the heritage of the
>     stable ext2 code. XFS will run fine under desktop or light loads,
>     but for server's I'd suggest treading carefully."
> 
>  --> Jijo
> 

Grr, test2 still has problems, xfs is pretty stable in 2.4, but not 
always so stable in 2.6. There are more fixes coming in test3. Any
anyone running a server in production on 2.6 yet needs their head
examining.

Thanks for the pointer though.

Steve