On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 11:53 -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > I am working on a new server that looks like it is going to go in > service before RHEL 6 is released. I'm building it with plans to > upgrade the OS once RHEL 6 is out and I've tested it (I'm leaving empty > space on the OS drive to install RHEL 6 to a separate partition when I'm > ready). > > I'd like to use ext4 for the data filesystem for extent support and > better allocation patterns. Is anybody using ext4 on RHEL 5 in > production? Any comments, opinions, recommendations, etc.?
We're running them on some internal "production" servers which are basically large backup/archive servers. The volumes are 16TB ext4 and contain a mix of fairly large (100GB-1TB) files and a fairly small BackupPC repository with roughly 3 million hardlinks. Performance for the large files is noticeably better than ext3, both reading and writing, and especially deleting them. It would regularly take 10 minutes to delete a 200GB file from the ext3 volumes, and now it takes seconds. We've also running been running one 250GB development Oracle system with ext4. Haven't really noticed much performance difference in that environment, but haven't had any problems. My biggest disappointment with ext4 is that it's still limited to 16TB with the current e4fsprog versions. It appears that the filesystem itself is ready to break the 16TB barrier, but the userspace tools not so much. We tried switching to XFS since Redhat is now providing optional support for that filesystem, but we quickly hit several kernel crashes and and had to recover data with xfs_repair so we quickly gave up on paying extra for that feature. Anyone know if RHEL6 finally provides an out-of-box supported, single-user filesystem capable of breaking the 16TB barrier? Later, Tom _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
