[Samba] File Systems - Which one to use?

[John H Terpstra]

On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Dragan Krnic wrote:

> > 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 too have noted that the performance of ReiserFS varies considerablllly
across the versions. More recent versions appear to have a poorer write
rate (very subjective opinion - NOT rigorously tested!) but much better
read rates and fast directory lookups. As I said - "appears"! To do this
justice one needs to perform careful and methodical metrics.

> 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.

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!

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