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Gentree
Watchman
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 5077
Location: France, Old Europe
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 Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:02 pm Post subject: |
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| matobsk wrote: | I've been using reiser 4 as my / partition for a little over 6 months now, with no issues at all.
Apparently I've been very lucky thus far 
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Not really , despite all the flack I've seen Ive had very few problems (all minor) in two years using R4, ie since when it was still in beta test.
This current mess up is probably the worst since it was not flagged, but it was recoverable without losing any files. (Just cost may a day of my life!  )
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I can, however, attest to the fragmenting problem. With each new file downloaded and new package merged, I can actually feel my system getting slower and slower.
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You are saying you're seeing significant slow down due to fragmentation on R4. I thought this was more a problem for reiserfs.
Can you quantify this or is it just one of those "feels slower" things?
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I think I'm going to finish this emerge -u world and start making preparations to clone this partition and drop it onto a new XFS or ext3 filesystem.
Really too bad, this fs was blazing fast when I first started using it. All they need to do is re-release the repacker and I'd be good to go  |
Beware of the placebo effect , R4 can be significantly faster that ext3 under certain conditions but significant around 5%, it's not going to change your life.
Before trying xfs you should do some research, it can be blazingly fast as well , way faster than R4 .... but only on reads and with large files. Write times can be so horrible you dont even want to know.
Repacking R4 has to be done by a big copy or tarballing. Providing you have the space this is no worse, maybe even faster than a defrag tool.
My strategy is to keep partitions small (4 to 8 Gigs) , this makes backing up a whole lot easier , ie more likely to get done often enough, and makes a copy-repack quite quick and easy.
I keep stuff like portage, music and /home out on different files spaces and try to keep / as system only.
I stuff all my music, iso images, etc on xfs because it is practically r.o.
Backing up a monolithic 80G partition has a funny habit of never being done 
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Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
KX7-333 , AthlonXP1800+ @2.3GHz
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X @ 2.6/2.4GHz (winter/summer)
2.6.32-hh1 : portage ~x86 |
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matobsk
n00b
Joined: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 64
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 2:15 am Post subject: |
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Sorry I didnt respond to this earlier, I just finished stage4ing my install for the move over to XFS.
As much as I loved R4, I was beginning to worry about my hdd longevity with all the thrashing it was doing with the fragmentation. It felt noticably slower, and the only way to relieve the problem was to tarball it all and repop an empty R4 fs.
I did that twice, since I LOVED how fast R4 was for the small files. Since the process is the same to 'limp' along with R4 as it is to move to a different fs, I decided to give XFS a try.
So far, I like it a lot. It's not as fast as R4 is at the beginning, but it is TONS faster than a 2 month old R4 partition. My hdd no longer thrashes, and it was this piece of mind that I was seeking.
I should have thought to run seek time tests and benchmarks, but the night my system never stopped thrashing all night long made me quite angry.
I'll come back to R4 when they finally get their act together and release a working repacker.
EDIT: I did get word of some tool in the reiser4progs that attempts to measure fragmentation. When I tried to run it on a mounted partition it complained, so I just got rid of the whole problem. |
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Gentree
Watchman
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Posts: 5077
Location: France, Old Europe
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 10:52 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for the reply, always interesting to compare notes.
I have had this system#s root on R4 for a couple of months now and dont see any of the slow down that I had on reiserfs .. yet.
If I do have to copy every 6mths , for me its a price worth paying for the other benefits of R4. Easy fast backups is why I like small partitions.
I tried xfs briefly once on a test partition but I lost the whole partition after a power-off/lockup and there seemed no way to recover any of it. I quickly went off it. Worth considering.
If you are using xfs for root you may want to keep a clone handy.
Thx for your reply. 
_________________
Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
KX7-333 , AthlonXP1800+ @2.3GHz
AthlonXP-M on A7N8X @ 2.6/2.4GHz (winter/summer)
2.6.32-hh1 : portage ~x86 |
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matobsk
n00b
Joined: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 64
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| Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 6:05 am Post subject: |
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Heh, if that should happen to my box, I guess I'll have a reason to try reiser4 again with a regular backup script on smaller partitons.
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