[Samba] What project should I use ?

[Jay Ts]

John H Terpstra wrote:
> 
> Ext2fs is by far the fastest file system on Linux.

And this is great if you don't mind occasional hours-long fscks and
also a distinct possibility losing every file on the drive if the
system crashes at a bad moment.  (I've known of a number of cases
of the latter happening with ext2 filesystems, and it isn't pretty!)

Ext2 is fast, but IMO, it is the Achilles heel of any Linux system
that uses it. It is simply not up to the needs of serious, enterprise-
level or mission-critical computing. (I know this sounds like flame
bait, but I had to say it.)

> Ext3fs is the slowest, ReiserFS is in between them.

I think ext3 definitely needs some more development work, including
bug fixes.  But maybe someday it will be worthy of consideration.
I'm not as up to speed on journaling filesystems as I'd like to
be, but I read recently that ext3 is the only one that can journal
regular data as well as metadata. (Or at least attempts to ...
IIRC, there was a bugfix for that code recently!)  And of course,
that kind of filesystem reliability does not come without a price.

My point (obviously?) is that as usual, there are tradeoffs between
speed and data integrity. Faster is not always better.

> One of the things I want to do soon is to
> benchmark XFS and JFS against Ext2fs and Ext3fs.

Please feel encouraged!  I'd love to see the performance figures
for both XFS and JFS.

Jay Ts