Linux and Solaris performance

[Daniel Veillard]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 04:35:52PM -0400, Dave North wrote:
> That's a hell of a difference.  Very peculiar how the sun FS can be so
> incredibly slow compared to Linux - and these are reasonably high end
> sun Netra machines.  Very strange.  I wonder how reliable the Linux FS
> is then if it's extracting the files so fast...does sun have some
> ultra-realiable FS features or something I wonder.

  Depends of course on the type of FS used but basically this could be
summed up by:
  Linux will preserve the information of the existence of the newly
  created file with the same accuracy as the content of the file itself.
  Solaris (and historically most BSD derived FSes) will force the
  information that that file was created on disk even if the content
  of the file itself isn't yet preserved.
Solaris will force the synchronization of the metadata, while linux
will handle FS metadata as normal data and not put specific constraints
on the metadata flush. At least that's my understanding based on 7-8 years
old outdated now informations on the Solaris side, so take it with a
huge cube of salt :-)

Now on Linux, you are likely to be using ext3 based filesystem
where all data on disk will anyway been guaranteed to be in a coherent
state (or a coherent state can be reconstructed very quickly when
remounting the filesystem in case of a crash). The only difference is how
timely that coherent state is flushed on disk.

Daniel

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