Re: Opinions XFS
On Aug 4, 2007, at 5:46 PM, George N. White III wrote:
I'm quite impressed with the stability and performance of XFS and
having been using it for over a year on production servers that
run mail, file and web serving. (x86_64 etch)
Let us know how you feel once you have experienced a few hardware
failures.
I've had power cuts on XFS systems and I've never lost any data that
wasn't in the process of being written. In any filesystem you're
going to lose data in a power cut, and there aren't a lot of
situations where a truncated file is useful to me anyway, so I don't
generally worry too much about that, as long as the filesystem itself
stays intact.
I haven't had an IDE controller failures, so I can't say how XFS
would cope with that. I did have problems with an IDE controller on
a ReiserFS system, and the result was massive filesystem corruption.
I was eventually able to recover most of the data with reiserfsck,
but it required a long process of tree rebuilding, followed by hand-
renaming hundreds of files that now had only inode numbers. I kind
of shy away from ReiserFS now, partly because it seems fragile, and
partly because of doubts about its future -- ReiserFS v3 is no longer
being maintained, v4 is incompatible, and the original designer is no
longer involved with the project due to unrelated legal problems.
My workaday filesystem for things like home directories is still
ext3fs. I only use XFS when I have a special situation that plays up
some of ext3's less desirable performance characteristics, like
frequent deleting of large files. I used to also favor XFS when I
needed POSIX ACLs, because ACL support was more mature, but ext3
seems to have caught up.
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