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Ext3 vs Reiserfs
Or how we got distracted while installing the new mail server...

July, 11 2002
Part two of a five page article
page 1  page 2  page 3  page 4  page 5

Benchmarking Software:
PostMark - Developed by Network Appliance. An excerpt from the PostMark website:PostMark was designed to create a large pool of continually changing files and to measure the transactionrates for a workload approximating a large Internet electronic mail server.

PostMark generates an initial pool of random text files ranging in size from a configurable low bound to aconfigurable high bound. This file pool is of configurable size and can be located on any accessible filesystem.

Once the pool has been created (also producing statistics on continuous small file creation performance), aspecified number of transactions occurs. Each transaction consists of a pair of smaller transactions:
  • Create file or Delete file
  • Read file or Append file
The incidence of each transaction type and its affected files are chosen randomly to minimize the influenceof file system caching, file read ahead, and disk level caching and track buffering. This incidence can betuned by setting either the read or create bias parameters to produce the desired results.When a file is created, a random initial length is selected, and text from a random pool is appended up tothe chosen length. File deletion selects a random file from the list of active files and deletes it.

When a file is to be read, a randomly selected file is opened, and the entire file is read (using a configuredblock size) into memory. Either buffered or raw library routines may be used, allowing existing softwareto be approximated if desired.

Appending data to a file opens a random file, seeks to its current end, and writes a random amount of data.This value is chosen to be less than the configured file size high bound. If the file is already at themaximum size, no further data will appended.

When all of the transactions have completed, the remaining active files are all deleted (also producingstatistics on continuous file deletion).

Since we are going to use this machine as a mail server, this software sounds about right. On with the testing.

Next - First Results