Soliciting Opinions Regarding File Systems

[Mark Haney]

Sean McGlynn wrote:
> Hello,
>  
> We are considering what file system to use for an enterprise deployment of Linux.  We're reviewing EXT3, Reiser, XFS, and JFS.  The server will deal with a fair number of relatively large (GB+) files, and a good amount of relatively intermediate size (100-999 MB) files.  XFS and JFS appear to do best with intermediate and large files, and fairly well with smaller files.  Reiser does better with smaller files, and EXT3 has the distinction of being the default file system for Red Hat.  We feel XFS is likely the best choice, but wonder if there are any caveats, considerations, etc.  We will be taking advantage of LVM, if that has any bearing.
>  
> Thank you.
> 

I currently handle a little more than 20TB on an XFS SAN handling a 
mixture of large (>1GB) and small files for an weather research project. 
  I can say that XFS works really well in this environment with 
stability and throughput.  This project generates multiple-GB files in a 
4-6 hour period and during the generation of these files, the SGI boxes 
doing the processing (2 3700s with 20+ CPUS each) are continually 
hammering the filesystem on the SAN to pull the smaller files in for 
processing.  In every case XFS has held up under the load.

I can't think of a single caveat to using XFS, the maintenance/recovery 
tools work really well (we've had one RAID failure) and are very fast on 
large filesystems.

My.$0.02 from an enterprise perspective.



-- 
Ita erat quando hic adveni.

Mark Haney
Sr. Systems Administrator
ERC Broadband
(828) 350-2415