[Samba] suggestions for a "fast" fileserver - 1G / 10G

Christopher Chan christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk
Mon Mar 24 04:37:34 MDT 2014


On Monday, March 24, 2014 04:45 PM, Emmanuel Florac wrote:
> Le Sat, 22 Mar 2014 12:37:15 +0100 vous écriviez:
>
>> I'm looking for some recommendations for a "fast" fileserver regarding
>> the hardware you use.
>>
>
> 3° the filesystem is important. Don't use ext3, it's slow as snails
> crawling in molasses. ext4 is pretty slow, too.  If you want to get
> closer to bare metal performance, XFS is the best choice unless you
> need more than 25 ACLs per file.

Has XFS ever got another journaling mode other than writeback? Hmm, 
wikipedia entry seems to indicate it is now the equivalent of ext3's 
ordered. But wait, it also says that journal updates are done 
asynchronously. Which is it? In any case, have fun with this filesystem 
that only journals metadata and maintains humongous caches. Your open 
files are really really safe in the event of a crash.

If you want to talk about performance, please do use ext3 or ext4 with a 
BBU NVRAM block device for the journal and use full journaling mode. Not 
risky filesystems like XFS.

>
> 4° filesystem options: if you have a RAID controller with BBU or like
> to live dangerously, use nobarrier option or barrier=0.  Don't use
> data=ordered (well, if you really want to use ext4 try not to tie its
> short legs).

I'd prefer to use md and a bbu-nvram card than rely on a hardware raid 
controller. If you are doing raid5 or raid6 then make sure you have 
plenty of cache on that controller along with the backup battery.


More information about the samba mailing list