On 11/14/2011 4:27 AM, Jan-Frode Myklebust wrote:
Agree. A non-clustered fs should give you better performance, and probably also be more reliable, if you can live with the SPoF and full downtime during patching/upgrades/maintenance. But I would expect xfs to be a better choice than ext*.
Depends on the workload characteristics and how well the XFS filesystem is tuned to the storage hardware. If setup properly, using many allocation groups with fast spindles, a decent amount of BBWC, and a high concurrency maildir workload (dozens to hundreds of delivery and IMAP operations), XFS will runs circles around EXTx as it can create/write/read to every AG in parallel. Much of EXT4's operation is still serialized. This is why XFS outruns all other filesystems in the highly parallel mail workload benchmarks I posted previously, EXTx by a factor of 2-3.
For smaller hosts that don't see parallelism, for example SOHO servers, XFS will likely be slower than EXTx as the workload will be serialized.
-- Stan