Re: Ext3 vs NTFS performance

Albert Cahalan
2007-05-06T01:48:37Z

Andrew Morton writes:
> "Cabot, Mason B" <mason.b.cabot@intel.com> wrote:

>> I've been testing the NAS performance of ext3/Openfiler 2.2 against
>> NTFS/WinXP and have found that NTFS significantly outperforms ext3 for
>> video workloads. The Windows CIFS client will attempt a poor-man's
>> pre-allocation of the file on the server by sending 1-byte writes at
>> 128K-byte strides, breaking block allocation on ext3 and leading to
>> fragmentation and poor performance. This will happen for many
>> applications (including iTunes) as the CIFS client issues these
>> pre-allocates under the application layer.
>
> Oh my gawd, what a stupid hack. Now we know what the
> MS interoperability lab has been working on.

Stupid or not, this is their protocol. The cifs filesystem
driver needs a patch to do this. Probably that'll help get
better performance when Linux is writing to a Windows server.