[rescue] Filesystem choice for fileserver?

[Mike Shields]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:46:01AM +0900, kevin r. marhsall wrote:
> [...]
> > I have recently done some work on a RHEL box using ext3 and have had
> some
> > significant issues with large files taking forever to delete. This has
> > come up with one single 80Gb file and in situations when deleting large
> > directory trees. Unfortunately, this is all anecdotal as i have not done
> > much to try and determine if the source of the slowdown.
>
> Yes, unlink *is* expensive on ext3. That's because the file's inode and
> indirect blocks all have to be walked to determine which blocks to mark in
> the free space map. I suspect that unlink also locks the filesystem until
> the operation is complete.
>
> Still, it's not as if you're regularly deleting 80GB files...


I have a machine serving as a PVR and regularly delete files in the 2 to 4
gb range. I don't have any detailed metrics but it would take 5 - 10 seconds
to delete each file when I used ext3 as my filesystem. I switched over to
xfs after finding that this was a well-known sore spot in ext3, and have
never looked back -- although I still use ext3 for my root filesystem.

I'll grant though that my choice of xfs also had something to do with my
mild SGI fanaticism...

Speaking of rescue and SGI's, I'm on the hunt for some RM5 modules to beef
up my the RE2 in my deskside Onyx...