Performance characteristic of various filesystem

[Anthony M. Rasat]

Lie Ryan wrote:
>I'm not interested in how fast read/write is in the file system, rather I 
want to know how the filesystem copes with large numbers of files.

I will talk this purely out of my own experience instead of presenting statistic figures.

Ext2 and ext3 are slow. That's for sure. And handling large number of files going to be pain in the a$$ with these two. And they could lose your file during bad crashes.

I had better experience with xfs but if only you had large number of large files (movies, lots of 700MB+ files). However I think xfs was not fast on large number of small files. My horror experience of crashes in xfs made me turned away from it.

Now mainly I'm using Reiserfs and JFS. Reiserfs is fast handling small and large files. However I did experience file losses on Reiserfs during crash. JFS in the other hand is not as fast as Reiserfs but not as slow as ext2/ext3. Large number of small files is better handled by JFS than ext2/ext3. I never had file loss with JFS. Yet.

Now, I usually employ Reiserfs on desktops and JFS on servers. But that's just me. I could be bias on both case.

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Regards,

Anthony M. Rasat
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