XFS: the filesystem of the future? [LWN.net]

XFS: the filesystem of the future?

Posted Jan 29, 2012 6:45 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: XFS: the filesystem of the future? by sbergman27
Parent article: XFS: the filesystem of the future?

If I sent out a survey to my customers asking their opinion on reliability vs performance on filesystems, I already know what they would say. Reliability over performance: 100%. Performance over reliability: 0%.

I don't believe that is true. If you ask them then sure, they will pick reliability but in actual operations they will performance first most of the time. Witness the popularity of MySQL/myisam which makes that exact trade off, if reliability was the most important thing everyone would use PostgreSQL and no one would have even heard of MySQL. What people actually do and what they say are often diametrically opposed.

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XFS: the filesystem of the future?

Posted Jan 29, 2012 20:51 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

"I don't believe that is true. If you ask them then sure, they will pick reliability but in actual operations they will performance first most of the time."

No, they would not. None have any complaints about our filesystem performance, either on my CentOS 4 machines using Ext3 mounted data=ordered, or on my later servers with Ext4 mounted nodelalloc. Benchmarking of Ext4 with and without nodelalloc always come out pretty much a wash. I've never understood what the fuss was about. Delayed allocation just doesn't improve performance noticeably. Nor did Ext3 with data=ordered in any of the server scenarios I have been involved with. And I see no appreciable difference regarding fragmentation rates, either.

If you've done your own benchmarks with your own server workloads which disagree with mine, I would be interested in hearing about them.

But regarding delayed allocation in ext4 and xfs, and the "wonders" of making data=writeback the default for ext3, I must observe that the Emperor has no clothes.