Guru Labs

Ext3 vs Reiserfs

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

July, 11 2002
Part five of a five page article
page1 page 2 page 3 page4 page 5

PostMark Configuration:

set size 1000 300000
set number 4000
set transactions 200000

This last test doubles the amount of files to 4000, and drastically bumps the maximum file size to 300,000 bytes, and has a net result in causing about 19GB of data to be read and written to. This by far exceeds the RAM on the system and should generate a massive amount of IO on the drives. This should be interesting to see how the filesystems compare when the system is being crushed.

Results in text form

We'll refrain from recommending one of the other. However, it is clear that writeback journaling mode of Ext3 is much faster than ordered in this benchmark. For correctly written apps, writeback mode is 100% safe. For poorly written apps, Ext3 ordered or journalled can offer additional assurances of correctness. A battery backed disk controller enables the safe use of your drive's hardware write back cache, increasing performance.

We welcome any comments, email us: WebComments@GuruLabs.com

Thanks for the suggestions and comments! We are setting up one our classrooms (full of identical high-end machines) to do an exhaustive filesystem test. We'll expand our coverage to include ext2, XFS and JFS. We'll use additional benchmarking software besides PostMark. Finally, we will be testing FreeBSD as well.