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Cinquero
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 2:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I really cannot reproduce some of the results here. To be honest, I don't like synthetic benchmarks at all and usually run more realistic tasks. For example, I compared tar'ing two different portage trees -- each three times -- in parallel on ext3 and xfs. That is, 6 parallel "tar cf" commands taring the two portage trees from the benchmark disk to the same disk.

On ext3, it took 847 seconds. On xfs, only 40% of the full tar file size had been reached after the same amount of time.

I don't think I will try the extra mount options as everyone should really know by now that XFS is not suited for desktop use.

Use XFS for your DV scratch disk. ext3 should still be the best solution for the usual desktop use.
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jsosic
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 9:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wanna talk syntetic? Well, untaring 3 tars at the same time on the FS is more syntetic than bonnie...That's action that will very rarely and I would dare to say never occour on a desktop system.... Also, filesystem you use for your desktop should have fast reading and low latencies, fast seeks, and bonnie tests just that. It creates files with names in sequential order (1234, 1235, 1236, 1237, 1238), but writes them randomly on disk (eg { [1237] [1234] [1238] [1236] [1235] } ), and then reads them in numerical order, so seek times of FS come really into play. If files are of random size, you've got real life test. Untaring is pretty straightforward, and occours once in a lifetime of a program. You emerge program once, and run X times after that! I would change all these filesystems for a one that writes files 5 times slower, but organizes them ideally so read times are 1.5x to 2x faster than XFS/JFS/ext3 !!! Desktop would benefit from such approach. Also, you forget importance of partition layout and placement of the files on partition(s), sometimes it's far more important than FS...
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Cinquero
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 12:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

jsosic wrote:
Wanna talk syntetic? Well, untaring 3 tars at the same time on the FS is more syntetic than bonnie...


I have not seen any concurrent access timings in your results. That's mainly why I call it synthetic. I often untar/tar large archives, sync the portage tree, run updatedb, some checksum operations, and edit large images in gimp at the same time (well, maybe not ALL of it at the same time, but some) and THAT bogs down my system extremely. And that is what I personally feel is the most critical situation for a desktop because the desktop latency then goes down to 1-2 minutes... although I am using ionice, CFQ, and the big kernel lock (and I have 1280 MB RAM).
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jsosic
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 1:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, if you use so much concurrent operations on the same partition, than ext3 with data=journal mount option is a way to go....
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 22, 2006 7:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bonnie has option for defining number of concurrent requests :) And as I've said earlier, I would give up all the writing performance on some partitions just for a few MB/s faster reads....
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 10:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

so, in short, for an xfs 32-bit desktop system, and a 16 gb partition, you would recommend :
Code:

mkfs.xfs -l version=1,size=64M -n size=8k -i size=1024 -d agcount=2

then i could mount my partition using the following options :
Code:

noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=8


would that be ok ?
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all-inc.
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 3:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

DON'T use mkfs.xfs -i size=1024. this suggestion is wrong, as described in this thread, only a mistake in the initial post... -d agcount=n where n is the size of you partition in GB divided by 4 to 8. and you don't have to use the nodiratime mount option, it is implied by noatime.

BTW which way you all convert your root filesystems? i booted a livecd(2006.1) and run
Code:
rsync -e rsh -aSq
to put it all on free space to another box. i just had to type the rsh and rsync commands with their paths, because the gentoo minimal livecd doesn't provide them(/mnt/gentoo/usr/bin/{rsync,rsh}). i first tried tar clafS which seems also ok but doesn't handle sockets... my partition layout now(of course everything mounted with noatime):
Code:
/dev/hda8             6,8G  4,1G  2,8G  61% /   jfs (journal size=0.8%)
udev                  252M  296K  251M   1% /dev
/dev/hda9             3,8G  1,8G  2,1G  47% /var  xfs (logbufs=8,nobarrier(since 2.6.17, my hd doesn't support...))
/dev/hda10            3,8G  1,2G  2,7G  30% /home xfs
/dev/hda7              33G   17G   16G  53% /mnt/media  ntfs-3g(so win can access them...sometimes unfortunately neccesairy :( but the new ntfs-3g performance is nice)
none                  252M  4,0K  252M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/hda6              24G   22G  1,9G  93% /mnt/data  ntfs-3g

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Don-DiZzLe
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 16, 2006 9:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, first of all do I first need to make an XFS partition with for example gparted and then enter the following code

Code:
mkfs.xfs -b size=8192 -l internal,size=128m -d agcount=20 /dev/sdb1


to have an XFS of steroids partition or do just input the code directly in the terminal without creating an XFS partition first?
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brot
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 10:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thank you for your Tips. I am using XFS since 3 years now, and the first use of it was my router. From time to time it got its power chord plugged out while running, but XFS survived until now, and i think it will the next 3 years ;)
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jsosic
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Don-DiZzLe wrote:
Ok, first of all do I first need to make an XFS partition with for example gparted and then enter the following code


You can enter the code in the shell directly. I presume you're new to linux, so think of it like typing "format d:" in DOS :)

BTW, for all of you who didn't knew, xfs utils incorporate xfs_fsr, it's a defragmenter (filesystem reorganizer). So, to check the currnet state of your XFS (online), type this as root:
Code:
xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/hdXY

That will tell you percent of fragmentation on that partition. After that, simply run:
Code:
xfs_fsr

to reorganize all XFS partition defined in fstab.

Good luck! :)
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:03 pm    Post subject: About Allocation Groups Reply with quote

About allocation groups in XFS... When I was reading a paper (warning: 8 MegaByte PDF! See the chapter called "Exploring high bandwidth filesystems on large systems" by the SGI employees) about XFS scalability, it became apparent just what enormous workloads XFS was intended for. The default number of allocation groups that mkfs.xfs creates, and that whole business about megabytes per allocation group, was probably intended for ridiculously-large scales. If you're putting together a gigantic hundred-disk enterprise server used by thousands of concurrent users, then maybe the defaults make sense (but on the other hand, you're probably not using Gentoo).

For a desktop system or even a medium-business server, the defaults are way too high. When choosing allocation groups, the thing to think about is how many parallel writes you're going to have going on at once, and I mean writes that extend files, not writes into middle of files as you would have with relational databases. The size of your volume does not matter, so don't choose it by dividing Gigabytes by some constant. Choose it by thinking about file-extending writes.

On desktops and light servers, I've never used an agcount higher than 4, and I've been pretty happy so far.
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jsosic
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Excellent point! We're all going to keep that in mind...
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 3:57 pm    Post subject: Re: About Allocation Groups Reply with quote

Sorry about the link to the 8MB PDF. I found a much smaller PDF that just includes the XFS scalability paper all by itself.
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 10:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

heya
thanks for the post. I'm running XFS for some years now and never had a problem, it's perfectly stable, it doesn't get corrupted when plugging out the power, and it's faster than any other fs i've tried before. Well, maybe jfs could be faster, but it bombed my hd and made me having to install a 3 months old backup :)

The logbuf mount-option seems to help a lot - no more lightning slow deletes ;)

Anyway, maybe you could correct you're first posting with the new insights you got in this thread. This would help people a lot by not forcing them to reformat after reading the second page ;)

kthxbye
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jsosic
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 11:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've fixed original post, and even included xfs_db & xfs_fsr hints.
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vipernicus
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 4:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Can you defrag XFS while it is online/mounted?
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brot
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 4:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yes you can :)

(with xfs_fsr as root)
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kos
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is strage, but xfs_fsr is missing in my system.
Quote:

root@kos ~ $ equery f xfsprogs | grep bin
/sbin
/sbin/fsck.xfs
/sbin/mkfs.xfs
/sbin/xfs_repair
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/xfs_admin
/usr/bin/xfs_bmap
/usr/bin/xfs_check
/usr/bin/xfs_copy
/usr/bin/xfs_db
/usr/bin/xfs_freeze
/usr/bin/xfs_growfs
/usr/bin/xfs_info
/usr/bin/xfs_io
/usr/bin/xfs_logprint
/usr/bin/xfs_mkfile
/usr/bin/xfs_ncheck
/usr/bin/xfs_quota
/usr/bin/xfs_rtcp
root@kos ~ $ equery l xfsprogs
[ Searching for package 'xfsprogs' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ~] sys-fs/xfsprogs-2.8.11 (0)


Is there any other way to defragment XFS?
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brot
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I forgot: you have to emerge xfsdump first ;)
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 2:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you guys use CFQ or Deadline with XFS? And why?
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kos
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 10:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

brot wrote:
I forgot: you have to emerge xfsdump first ;)


thanks :)
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 8:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Do you guys use CFQ or Deadline with XFS? And why?

I use CFQ. Why? I like the name.

Seriously, i never noticed a difference when i switched schedulers, so i stayed with the default.
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Don-DiZzLe
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 1:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hello,

I would like to make a 20GB partition using the XFS on steroids command;

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mkfs.xfs -l internal,size=128m -d agcount=2 /dev/sda1
Cannot stat /dev/sda1: No such file or directory

How do I go at it?
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 6:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mkfs.xfs -l internal,size=128m -d agcount=2 /dev/sda1
Cannot stat /dev/sda1: No such file or directory


1st: use a REAL(tm) distro...for example gentoo ;)
2nd: try a "ls /dev". I bet /dev/sda1 isn't there, so you got probably something misconfigured in your kernel. Or maybe the drive is detected as ide, like /dev/hda or /dev/hdb? It's not xfs's fault that the device isn't there, it could be some udev-thing or something.
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 10, 2006 11:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm using XFS on LVM2. Is this a problem?

Code:
Filesystem "dm-1": Disabling barriers, not supported by the underlying device
XFS mounting filesystem dm-1
Ending clean XFS mount for filesystem: dm-1

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