[Samba] File Systems - Which one to use?

[Dragan Krnic]

> I have had issues with ReiserFS2.x,
> but we really need ACLs, so until
> some distro supports ACLs on ReiserFS,
> it's not coming near my file
> servers (mail/news/web maybe).

Thanks for moderation and additional answers to Simo, Buchan. 
I might be a bit overoptimistic about reiserfs. On the other hand, 
you are talking about problems with Version 2.x, which is quite old. 
What is now delivered is 3.6 and the author is bringing 4.0
real soon now.

I'm sure there will be pathological cases for reiser too, and it
might be less efficient than XFS for some uses where XFS shines.
But most of the real problems come from bad tuning or quite 
unrelated issues (e.g. network). That said, I find reiser the
most responsive fs to ls and find kinds of commands. I'll certainly 
learn more and try to put things in right perspective before I take 
it into production. I might share the results with the list.

> Benchmarks of ext3 vs ReiserFS have 
> shown similar performance of the two 
> when mounted with equivalent options

In another thread John Terpstra rightly positions reiserfs somewhere 
between ext2 and ext3, which means ahead of ext3. Benchmarks are
like statistics - dont't trust'em unless you forged them yourself.
They may be tweaked easily to favour one side over the other.
Unfortunately there is no consensus as to the weighting one should
assign to different numbers that can be obtained by doing this 
and/or that. In the end your mileage may vary widely.