[NBLUG/talk] Recommendations for journalling filesystems?

[Eric Eisenhart]

I recommend sticking with ext3 unless you have specific needs that it
doesn't meet.  It's very mature with the benefit that it can be treated as
if it's an ext2 filesystem.  With some specific needs you might just need to
tweak some of the ext3 options such as dir_index (speed up lookups in large
directories with a btree), block to inode ratio, journalling data instead of
just metadata, non-ordered journalling and various block-size options.

For instance, if you wanted to run a big, high-performance NNTP server with
a terabyte or three of ~10K files with some directories containing a
hundred thousand files, ext3 wouldn't be the best choice.

And then if you *do* have a specific need that ext3 doesn't meet, I'd very
first consider a filesystem that the Linux distribution I'm using gives me
an option to create during installation.  I believe Debian and Ubuntu have
XFS as an option, for instance.

XFS and JFS are both mature on other platforms; I imagine that means there's
decent recovery tools.


One thing to remember is that XFS and JFS were originally designed with the
needs of enterprises in mind.  Places where SCSI (with automatic badblock
handling built into the HD firmware), RAID, daily backups to tape, and
notifications of potential drive problems before they're really a problem
are the norm.  In other words, they might anticipate that the way to handle
the (very unusual in the above situation) problem of a totally failed drive
(errr, failed RAID container) is to swap in new drives, recreate the RAID
group and restore from backup.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit