On Mon, 26 Mar 2012, Jason White wrote:
Tim Connors <tconnors@rather.puzzling.org> wrote:
XFS has recently taken the place of my backuppc server with its 14million inodes[1]. I like the fact that it has 20GB more space available to it, because somehow it simultaneously uses less space for the metadata, dynamically allocates the inodes, but only uses 7% of the available inodes, whereas the previous ext4 incarnation has been using 25% of the available inodes, and still took 20GB more to store them. But it's slower, I'm worried about the NFS lockup problem Craig mentioned, and I don't like disappearing files, even (especially?) on a backup/archival server. Am I going to spend another month moving it all back to ext4?
Have you had disappearing files, or confirmation that there's a bug which will cause them on your kernel version, or are you just worried by this thread that data might be lost?
Years ago when I first tried non stanard filesystems like jfs and xfs, I encountered missing files. As having to restore from backup after unclean shutdown sort of defeats the non-fscking benefits of having a journalled filesystem, I decided to give them a miss and move back to ext3 for many years until I decided that a backup installation is not as critical as $HOME, and I could probably afford to experiment again. So far, not quite so sure the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Nice to have 20GB extra, but now that I have 7TB of spinning metal, less important. And plus, XFS fanbois annoy me. (I also tried btrfs this time around. But very very very slow for the lots of hardlink activity that backuppc causes, and it mistakenly optimises write with its elevator allocations instead of read. You do a heck of a lot more reads with backuppc than writes (well, after the initial backup, anyway)). -- Tim Connors