Re: [linux-lvm] EXT3 vs Reiserfs

[Chris Cox <chris_cox@stercomm.com>]

Yanick Quirion wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Could you please tell what is the best filesystem for linux between ext3 and reiserfs?
> 
> I know that ext3 can handle ACLs and not online fs extend, and reiserfs do not seems to support ACLs (I found some patches for kernel 2.4.21, but there are errors when I apply them to the kernel sources), but can be extend while it's online.
> 
> I'm just asking for your personal opinion and knowledge with them.
> 

If you are using SUSE, then use reiserfs.  It has ACLs and is mostly patched.

If you are using RH, then use ext3.  RH in the past has been known to have
a broken reiserfs (not known for keeping it patched).

In my performance benchmarks, I found reiserfs to be somewhere between jfs and ext3, where
ext3 was the fastest, but reiserfs doing exceptionally well on random file creates
and deletes.  Thought ext3 beats reiserfs in many of our tests, it was not by
an overwhelming margin.  We were very surprised by the lack of performance of JFS.. though
it did have the lowest CPU utilization of the 3.

We run SUSE primarily... therefore we use reiserfs (mostly with LVMs).
RH is sorta new to the LVM thing... so although we use ext3 on our RH systems,
most of them do not use LVM.  We have over 7TB of data that uses LVM with
reiserfs... we're quite pleased with the performance and capability.

We love the ability to do resize_reiserfs while the filesystem is mounted.
Constantly amazes the "Unix" purists.