The Filesystem choice thread - Part 2

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

because you waste space (and cpu cycles) for nothing. If you 'compress' mp3, flac, avi, jpg, all you get is a lot of wasted electricity and bigger files. compression is fine. forced compression is not.
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Captain Newbie · Apprentice Joined: 22 Dec 2006 Posts: 182 Location: Socal

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

the fear was created by misunderstanding. The plugins are not 'plugins' - ie runtime loadable binary stuff. It is just a way to make r4 enhanceable in an easy way - on source code level.

Besides, the same reviewers who pissed their pants over plugins, had no problems with xfs and its proprietary, closed source cxfs hooks ....
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

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coolsnowmen · Veteran Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 1479 Location: No.VA

Veldrin · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 9:20 am Post subject:

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

if you want to use hibernation and stuff, you need double ram. Everything else will lead to problems at some point.
I even have 16GB of swap with 4gb ram - because I plan to increase ram to 8gb in the next 12 month.
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

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coolsnowmen · Veteran Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 1479 Location: No.VA

@energyman,
you are by far an outlier in my experiance (If that situation is every actually encountered). I am talking about recommendations. If you have determined that you need something, then go for it, but even to linux users, I would never recommend a 16gb swap partition.

Though this statement seems backwards to me:

pdw_hu · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 4:06 pm Post subject:

Why waste a whole partition for swap? Just dd yourself a swapfile and use that one.

timeBandit · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 4:39 pm Post subject:

A swap partition performs better than a swap file due to the absence of filesystem overhead. This is especially true for huge swap files because the file is all but certain to be fragmented.
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energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

swapfiles aren't slower anymore - if they are created on a virgin fs.

Why do I have such a big swap?
Because: I have two identical disks in a Raid1 setup (and maybe I will go Raid5 soon). 8gb of swap per disk. I started with one disk - and when I got another one, I just migrated to raid withou re-partitioning. Since I want to have 8gb of ram anyway in the near future, it wasn't even worth it. So I have 16gb swap.
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

I identify as a dirty penismensch.

aidanjt · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 1:31 am Post subject:

timeBandit · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 1:50 am Post subject:

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

aidanjt · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 3:12 am Post subject:

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

*yawn* just look at several threads in this forum alone, will you?

lvm is broken. If you never update your kernel, like servers do, or use a commercial distro with full support, like servers do, it might be fine.
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

I identify as a dirty penismensch.

aidanjt · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 6:13 am Post subject:

Flarkis · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 6:14 pm Post subject:

ok well i return. Right now im watching the progress of the new build system and it is looking usefull for when i rebuild my system. As for everyone here thanks for al your help i have my partition lay out all figured out and i think ill wait until KDE 4.2 until i switch over.

Concerning my swap yes im on a laptop but honestly i dont use hybernate that often. When i am on windows i use it because it takes 5min to load Vi$t@ but if im concerned about speed i use xfce which i can have up and running after a boot in less than a minute. So i will probably shrink it down ALOT. Right now i set up a script to record swap usage every 5min. I'll see how much my computer actually needs an work from there.
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Ormaaj · Guru Joined: 28 Jan 2008 Posts: 319

IMHO, the general overviews of filesystems in the Gentoo handbooks needs to be updated. For instance, it gives the impression that reiserfs is far superior to others when in fact there is much more to consider. For a newcomer, they may not go and do a whole lot of extra research beyond the few sentences describing a few file-system choices in the handbooks. These should be slightly expanded and updated with new information.

Simba7 · Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 7:49 am Post subject:

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

well, just a few days ago, I saw good use for the huge swap. I found a way to make plasma explode - using up gigabytes of ram in mere seconds. Thanks to my huge swap, I was able to log in on a vt (it was very slow) and kill plasma, before the oom killer started to kill something I really need (you know the oom killer always kills the wrong apps).

So, how much swap was used up before I killed plasma?

6gb.

Yes, 6gb.
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Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

I identify as a dirty penismensch.

v_arnold · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 52 Location: London

Ext3 is rock-solid stable. Why would anyone use anything else, especially for the baselayout ?

If you insist on using any of the other filesystems, it should be for specific datatype perfomance boosts. But from my experience, ext3+hdparm is already pretty good.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

paluszak · Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2009 2:45 pm Post subject:

Just my two cents. I had reiserfs as the main fs on my laptop for about 4 years. I run a stable system and reliability is generally more important for me than speed alone because most of my work is done on this machine.

And here are my impressions. In two words, reiserfs sucks.

1. After some time and numerous portage syncs the main partition became so fragmented that reiserfs performance dropped almost to vfat levels (exaggeration for the sake of discussion here, but it's very slow anyway).

2a. Data corruption. Three times the partition became so corrupted for unknown reasons after sudden power losses that I had to boot from a CD, fix the partition off-line and copy some system files from Gentoo installation CD just to make my system boot again. But I could live with that, cause at least I knew that things were broken.

2b. Silent data corruption. That's the major issue for me. I ran an app one day, shut it, tried to run again and suddenly I got segfaults all over with no apparent reason (no updates in the meantime). So I did emerge -e something and everything went back to normal. Then, after few months the same happened with another app. Then I burned a movie for somebody, and the movie file was ok when I had watched it some time before, and that somebody complained that I gave him a broken avi file, so I tried to play it from my hdd and voila, it was completely borked.

3. Last but not least, CPU usage can go so high during minor file operations that it prevents me from working normally for a few seconds, which is a major inconvenience.

I would like to point that hardware-wise my system is completely healthy (I used to do some hardware testing for a hardware vendor as my job for some time, so I know how to do it).

So, I'm getting rid of reiserfs and I'm installing ext3 waiting until ext4 becomes more stable (not only in terms of kernel inclusion) and adequately tested.

J.

jancici · Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 10:37 pm Post subject:

I am doing some DVD authoring on new partition wiht ext4 and using dvdstyler

after clicking creating DVD from big mpeg files {1.4GB for each} my laptop is starting to be very slow.

checking what is going on ... I did find out with IOTOP that pdfflush and kjournald2 is using 99% of sources together with dvdstyler subprogram ...

is ext4 good for laptop ?
how can I tune ext4 or kernel to be much more speed? or flexible ?
thanks

Flarkis · Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2009 1:01 pm Post subject:

Just a minor update for anyone who cares. Got the results of my swap usage test over about 2 weeks with normal computer usage (including emerge -uDN world every once in a while). My average swap usage was 16mb and my peak swap usage was 22mb. So i think im going to reclaim afew gb worth of disk space now
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