On Sat, 2008-02-16 at 00:32 +0100, Wael Nasreddine wrote: > > > To your filesystem scheme: Why do you use xfs for usr? AFAIK XFS is good > > at write speed but not worth the trouble when reading data and data in > > usr is usually written once, updated every few months and read many > > times a week (on rebooting Desktop PCs maybe once a day). I'd use > > reiserfs3.6, maybe even without notail to make it more space efficient. > I don't use XFS, curently I only have / and /home and I want to split > it to more smaller partitions, I'm on LVM so it's easy, anyway I'm > going with ReiserFS for /usr /var, would you please suggest > mkfs.reiserfs options as I have nerver used ReiserFS-3 before (yep 5 > years using linux and I've always used ext3...) also You didn't mention > /var, would you say ReiserFS-3 is a good choice as well?
I don't think there's alot to do when creating a reiserfs. You could change the number of blocks for the journal. A bigger journal allows larger transactions which speed up write actions but might waste space. If you've got a second hard drive you could use an external journal but I've never done any benchmarking on that issue although I use it on my personal wannabe server (a raid1 and a single disk for the journal and unimportant data). I didn't comment on /var because I don't know how you use it. I suspect it to hold alot of temporal data like lock files, spools and so on. So there's a lot of creating and removing files going on, possibly in parallel. XFS is good in parallel and in creating files but terrible in removing files. Reiserfs with notail seems a good choice if you ask me (what you did ;) ) > > > I'd also use ext2 on /usr/portage. These data don't need journaling. > > Everything's got an MD5-sum to make sure it's unchanged after a crash > > and you can easily resync. I found ext2 with 2k blocks to be faster than > > reiserfs3.6, even on read-performance. > I've already made the partition as suggested in [1] I used this > command: > $ mke2fs -b 1024 -N 200000 -m 0 -O dir_index > > I guess 1K block size would be faster?? I'm not sure. 2K blocks might reduce fragmentation. If you look at the output of find /usr/portage/ -type f | xargs du -h --apparent-size you'll see that there are quiet a few files larger than 1K but most are smaller and might stay that small. So yes, I think 1K is a good choice but you won't loose much with 2K, maybe you even gain some speed. > > > If I were you, I'd also use separate volumes for /tmp and /var/tmp > > (without ccache) with xfs. > What did you mean by 'without ccache'? I have ccache and I use it... I meant that you should keep ccache on a separate partition. I just think: Less stuff in the FS, less work on allocation and lookup, more speed. And there's a lot of stuff in 2GB ccache. By the way: I don't think /var/tmp is a good place for ccache (not technically, just for the sake of layout). I've moved it to /var/db since it's not really a bunch of temporary data but more like a changing database. > > > /home could use data=journal. Those data are precious and if I remember > > correctly, this setting even brings an obscure (i.e. undocumented) speed > > improvement with many parallel disk accesses, for example in a > > multi-user environment. > it's done, thanks, BTW what's your home partition FS? your choice is > ext3 or reiserFS?? > I use reiserfs3.6 without notail but that doesn't mean that it would be a good choice for you. I'm on laptop and disk space efficiency is a big topic for me so I use tail-packing wherever suitable. And yes, I am a fan of ReiserFS-3.6. I think it's the best multipurpose FS. You can easily adapt it for high performance or high disk space efficiency. If its journaling would be as good as Ext3's data=journal I'd use it everywhere except for small partitions (ext2) and big files (ext3 and xfs). > One last thing, since I'm on LVM resizing the partition is a must > feature, in ext3 I use resize2fs which works quite nicely, is > resize_reiserfs as reliable as resize2fs is?? > Yes, it's just as good and the sky's the limit for resizing :) Oh, by the way: If you choose to use XFS somewhere, keep in mind that you can't shrink and XFS-FS. Neither online nor offline. One last thing: It's a bit old but I think it's still interesting, especially for XFS-users: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1479435
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