On Thu, 01 Nov 2001 09:18:30 -0500, "Ronald J. Hall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> >
> > I think that Red Hat had a very valid reason _not_ to include ReiserFS. You
> > must remember that Red Hat is a server distro that prizes security and
> > reliability
>
> Hi! Just as an observation, while on the Linux Lunacy trip, I got a chance to
> hear Michael Johnson of Redhat speak. He was asked by a software engineer from
> Brussels why not ReiserFS. Michael made comments to the effect of what you
> just said.
>
> However, to be fair, didn't ext3 fail Civileme's sledgehammer hardware test?
>
> So...I guess there are valid concerns both ways. Once the ReiserFS gets a
> little maturity, do you think it will stack up better serverwise, against the
> ext3 fs?
>
> Later! ;-)
It really depends on what you're doing. I wasn't trying to diss ReiserFS in my
earlier post - I use it at home and I quite like it. However, every FS has its
strengths and weaknesses, and overall I think that Ext3 is a better server FS.
ReiserFS is best when space is at a premium (because the tails can be packed),
or when you're dealing with many small files. The former case is uncommon in the
server arena (since servers usually have oodles of space). The latter may come
into play in a webserver environment, where many small HTML and picture files
are served. I have little idea of how ReiserFS currently behaves in a RAID
environment, which is common on servers. It used to have RAID issues, but now I
believe it works... slowly (IIRC).
ReiserFS is built using balanced trees, which are generally slow. Nevertheless,
Hans Reiser and his crew have done a marvellous job at making ReiserFS a
relatively fast FS. Still, I don't think it is a real 'heavy duty' FS, nor was
it designed to be. Reiser 4, due 30 September 2002, will be built using the more
advanced dancing trees method. It will feature a plug-in architecture, allowing
the easy creation and addition of extensions. It will be secure (they're being
funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), and it should be
capable of doing what ReiserFS was originally slated to do - host a database
_directly_ on the filesystem. This should dramatically boost database
performance, and should make Reiser 4 the fastest FS around for databases.
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan
Microsoft? Is that a kind of a toilet paper?
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