Posts Tagged ‘ReiserFS’
ReiserFS vs. ext3
Today while waiting for a new server to be setup I received a call from the system admin. He was at the point of setting up some storage shelves on the new server and had a question. ReiserFS or EXT3? In my experience, EXT3 has been the most stable and easy to recover file system. ReiserFS is supposed to be the fastest with small files. ReiserFS is only fast in Namesys benchmarks. The problem with reiser is that readdir operations don’t return the filenames in the same order they were written to disk (inode order). So if you pack thousands of small files into a directory, then try to back them up with tar, or copy them, or search through them for a string, Your IO throughput drops to nearly 0 while the hard drive furiously seeks randomly across the whole platter for each and every file. JFS and XFS don’t have this problem, and were much faster for hosting large directories of small files (the Maildir test.)
