Re: Help creating filesystem (xfs) and partitioning

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

On 7/25/2013 8:47 PM, Roberto Spadim wrote:
>> And truthfully, for a system of this caliber, you don't really gain
>> anything by using XFS, certainly not from a performance standpoint.  If
>> you were already an XFS user on large systems and it was simply your "go
>> to" filesystem, then using it on this system may make sense.  And if you
>> don't have a working UPS, you should definitely stay away from XFS.
>> Power failure shouldn't cause filesystem corruption, but it may well
>> corrupt or zero out files that are open for write but not written.  XFS
>> journals metadata, not data.
> 
> i'm using xfs because i tested with ext4, xfs and reiserfs (v3) and
> xfs was the fastest
> i use UPS, but... well you know... some one can remove the power
> cable... users sometime make mistakes :) hehe
> i didn't tested the btrfs yet, i think it's not mature for production use
> 
> well power failure is a problem in any filesystem... what filesystem
> you consider is the "best"?

This depends on your use case and workloads.  EXT4 isn't suitable for
large multi-TB filesystems with highly parallel workloads whereas XFS
excels with these.  Neither XFS nor EXT4 are suitable for USB thumb drives.

> considering that:
> i'm running filesystem over md raid1
> best = good power failure
> files with >40gb (some mysql tables are big)
> a big directory structure (root directory with man pages libs, linux
> kernel and some packages that i compile (php, mariadb, apache), and
> others linux tools, etc...)
> a home directory with maybe many temporary files, mysql sometime
> create temporary files for query sorting, in this case crud operations
> happens very often, create file/put data/read/delete file
> 
> well i think it's a test scenario, but experiences/ideas are wellcome

As long as you have a good working UPS and barriers enabled (the
default) and working, then XFS should be fine.  XFS does a barrier write
test during mount.  If the test fails it will log an error in dmesg and
disable barriers.  This obviously requires corrective action.  Running
without barriers can potentially cause serious metadata corruption and
wreck the filesystem beyond repair due to drive caches not being
flushed.  If the test passes, barriers are enabled, nothing is logged,
and you're good to go.

-- 
Stan