[Samba] File Systems - Which one to use?

[John H Terpstra]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Dragan Krnic wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Dec 2002 16:43:40 John H Terpstra wrote:
> >On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Dragan Krnic wrote:
> >> In another thread John Terpstra rightly positions reiserfs
> >> somewhere between ext2 and ext3, which means ahead of ext3.
>
> >And for waht it is worth, even though I found ReiserFS the poorest
> >performing, I still use it on my file server. So, go figure, not
> >everyone needs a Maserati!
>
> Have I misquoted you, John? In the thread about an ideal samba server
> (Tyan, Athlons, IDE RAID - as if I wrote it) you said ext2 is by the
> most efficient and ext3 the least, with reiserfs somewhere between.
> Now it's the poorest performing. Have you got some new facts?

Nah, I goofed. ext3 is the poorest, but ReiserFS is NOT the fastest and
still I use it.

I just installed a new machine as my local server. Now running SuSE 8.1
Pro with ReiserFS. MB is MSI with Athlon XP1700+, 512MB DDR RAM with WD
80GB IDE 7200rpm with 8MB Cache.

I first installed Red Hat 8.0 with ext3 and it was able to write to disk
faster than 100Mbit/sec ethernet could deliver the data. During copying of
34GB data over the wire, memory usage was constant at 335MB. I was using
rsync (not samba) to copy my data.

I then installed SuSE with ReiserFS. Disk write using rsync again was
slower than 100Mbit/sec ethernet could deliver. Memory usage slowly grew
until I was using 100% of my 1024MB Swap. In fact I found it was faster
when I turned swap off!

So maybe my erroneous comment that I just said I goofed on, was in this
case not far from the truth after all. Anyhow, I am still using ReiserFS
and I know it is not the fastest.

- John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org