On 18:20 Wed 02 Feb , walt wrote: > > The ext4 wiki site claims that fsck runs 2 to 20 time faster than > ext3, depending on the number and size of the files contained in > the ext4 filesystem. > > I have no experience with ext4 (yet), but I would welcome comments > from those who do.
Well, on one of my machines, I have converted all my filesystems to ext4 recently. Basically, I did a backup of the data on the machine, reformated all my partitions as ext4 (except for /boot, which always remains ext2 here) and copied back the data. The largest of these "now ext4 and previously ext3" partitions is a 30% full, ~500 GB /home partitition (but don't ask me for the current number of files). While I'm not really one of those benchmark type of guys sitting in front of their computers with a watch and raving like mad about every 0.0001 second saved during some process, I would say that an fsck on that ext4 filesystem certainly works faster than it did when it still was a ext3 filesystem. Probably not really 20 times faster, but noticably faster. On the other hand, the ext3 incarnation of that fs was in use for years, the ext4 is a fresh copy of it, without any significant fragmentation (yet), so this might also play a role in leading to faster fsck performance. In any case, besides that I can say that at least on that one system of mine, ext4 works really well and I've not yet had any problems with it. Greetings, Nils -- Nils Holland * Ti Systems, Wunstorf-Luthe (Germany) Powered by GNU/Linux since 1998
