Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 10:29:54 -0600 From: "Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov> To: Chuck Youse <cyouse@paradox.nexuslabs.com> Cc: Ilia Chipitsine <ilia@cgilh.chel.su>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: why FFS is THAT slower than EXT2 ? Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.10.9910271026500.671784-100000@acl.lanl.gov> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910271158590.1849-100000@paradox.nexuslabs.com>
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On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Chuck Youse wrote: > One of the biggest reasons for the difference: FreeBSD, by default, > performs _synchronous_ metadata updates, and Linux performs asynchronous > metadata updates. > > It's definitely a bit slower, but the payoff is in reliability. I have > seen more than one [production!] Linux machine completely trash its > filesystems because the implementors decided that their "NT-killer" must > have good performance at the expense of serious, production-quality > reliability. To put it slightly more strongly: as far as I'm concerned ext2 is not a serious fs if you really care about handling power failures and other such fun things. In clusters as small as 64 machines I've measured a 5% probability that after a power failure one of the 64 ext2 file systems will have a trashed root file system. With freebsd, over a four-year span, running through lots of power outages, I didn't lose an FFS file system even *once* (except for the disk that burned up, but not even FFS can fix that one). ext2 needs a lot of help. Evidently it will be getting it soon, though. ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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