vmstech <vmstech@tpg.com.au> writes:
ReiserFS does seems just like the ducksnuts in terms of performance, but it seems to have accumulated some horror stories along the way: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/pipermail/linuxsa/2002-January/038035.html
Marcs being runing it for 5 years, no issues - any one else using it?
I'm currently phasing reiserfs out everywhere. While I don't recall major accidents (should I write incidents? nevermind) since the later 3.6 versions in the later 2.4 kernels, reiserfs has its limitations. Tail merging, space efficiency, is slow to write, so you'll usually mount -o notail. reiserfs has a limited number of files per hash value that a file system can hold, and the earlier reiserfs versions became extremely slow in the face of hash collisions. The quality of the reiserfsprogs is IMHO inferior to e2fsprogs.
ext3 has learnt the dir_index feature (dirhash) a while ago, it's a rather smooth migration (unmount, tune2fs, e2fsck -f -D to create indexes, mount) - but it turns out I don't have directories that are *so* full it would really matter for me. It appears to work well though.
It also seems a non-trivial to convert an existing ext3 install.
There is no conversion. Backup, reformat, restore.
If I'm going to go to that effort, I should probably contemplate xfs and jfs and make best choise first up - anyone got any experience with these where maildir is concerned?
I haven't dared put my Maildirs into either of these.
I used XFS once for a CVS spool and after a crash ended up with zero blocks in the ,v files, which caused the cvs server to crash. I'm not sure if that has been fixed since. I've never seen this happen with ext3.
SUSE are somewhat discontinuing JFS support in their SUSE Linux 9.3 distribution for "technical reasons" that aren't detailed.
Note however that ext3fs supports data journalling, so you can have all the expensive scattered synchronous writes (and the Maildir format has lots of these) turned into linear synchronous writes, which speeds up things quite a bit.
-- Matthias Andree