Some ext3 Filesystem Tips

[enderandrew]

I want to throw things right now.

I normally use Reiser4 all day long on all my boxes. I keep hearing the ext3 is more stable, and offers just as good performance when properly configured.

My first two boxes I put ext3 on, I had crashes and lost data within 2 weeks.

So I decided to go ahead on give ext3 one more try.

Brand new install. I just spent 4 days compiling everything. Now it won't boot, and it says /dev/root is corrupted. the fschk program spots the errors, attempts to fix them, but doesn't do any good. I know I am probably the exception to the rule, but 3 times out of 3, ext3 has taken a crap on me within 2 weeks of using it. I've never lost data with reiser4.

I'm *really* hoping I don't have to format and start over again, because my free time is next to nonexistant these days, but I thought ext3 was supposed to be absolutely stable as a rock.
_________________
Nihilism makes me smile.

[Doogman]

More info:

doug@ghidorah ~ $ uname -a
Linux ghidorah 2.6.16-ck12n #2 SMP Sat Jun 24 12:34:26 EDT 2006 i686 Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 175 GNU/Linux

I seem to be having the same slow-write problem with a box running 2.6.16-gentoo-r7. I would like to see some other people's benchmarks! Bonnie++ isn't that hard to run.

Question enderandrew... why move from Reiser when you weren't having problems?

Obviously people who use ext3 don't have to reformat partitions every other week as I think you would see some red flags raised somewhere.

<Testimonial> I've been using ext3 since it's inception and my filesystems survived numerious hard crashes and such while trying out new kernels and hardware. Heck, my last system had a hardware problem that when the MB had high IO it would occasionally corrupt the disk writes. Nice. Even so, I never lost a filesystem and in fact only noticied it when I seen the errors corrected during the monthly fsck. Moving to a Tyan K8E fixed all those problems. </Testimonial>

[enderandrew]

I was doing new installs on two more laptops.
_________________
Nihilism makes me smile.

[devsk]

[darklegion]

[devsk]

where does this config parameter lie? I can't find it.

PS: I found out why its not there. Its in a patch for mm kernel, which is not present in the latest gentoo-sources (at least that string CONFIG_ADAPTIVE doesn't figure in any of files under /usr/src/linux) that I am running. But the poster (and the link he posted) actually said it was in mainline kernel.

[devsk]

[devsk]

if it makes anybody happy knowing that they are not missing out on holy-grail, here it is:

[Sedrik]

How much improvement can one expect these tweaks(full journaling, indexing) to give?

Is it like 0.5% increase? more? less?

I'm a ext3 user already, have been since my friend pointed me to a post somewhere pointing out the faults of reiserfs (which I used before since it was the popular chooice).

Nice guide =)

*Edit
Please continue to add more tweaks and safe modes to run to the first post as time goes by =)
_________________
From Gentoo with love

[Sachankara]

Full journaling on Ext3 decreases the performance. People should try running with the default to see the speed difference.

Personally I've started to using XFS because it feels faster on everything but really large files. People should try XFS for their /usr/portage partition, then they might notice how fast it stays over time.
_________________
Gentoo Hardened Linux 2.6.21 + svorak (Swedish dvorak)

[devsk]

[adsmith]

If you want real data, here are some good and generally accepted benchmarks:
http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz

They are probably posted several pages back as well.

JFS and XFS are both excellent FS's, but as the previous posted said, neither support full-data journalling. With that fact and these benchmarks, EXT3 really shines.

By the way, for a while it was true that data journalling in EXT3 was somehow *faster* than just metadata journalling. See:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs8.html
I'm not sure if this is still true.

[codergeek42]

[mrcs]

[codergeek42]

[mrcs]

[neuron]

[mrcs]

[neuron]

[mrcs]

[neuron]

[wrc1944]

adsmith wrote:

[feld]

but some of us are more worried about filesystem integrity than being a ricer.

it's not like full journaled mode annihilates our performance in any considerable way...
_________________
< bmg505> I think the first line in reiserfsck is

if (random(65535)< 65500) { hose(partition); for (i=0;i<100000000;i++) print_crap(); }

[XenoTerraCide]

yep integrity. writes are noted to be slower, but reads should be as fast normally and faster (than writeback) while writing. I don't know about others but I read data more than i write it. the only thing I have on reiserfs is portage because I don't need integrity and it handles small files better. the rest I need integrity on. /var might be a good candidate for writeback because logs are constantly being written. and aren't read as much.
_________________
I don't hang out here anymore, try asking on http://unix.stackexchange.com/ if you want my help.

[1bitmemory]

Has anyone here played with the ext3 patch set mentioned here ( http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/6/6/65 ) ? Some more explanations here http://lwn.net/Articles/80285/



1bm