[Gllug] Reiserfs faster boot

[Nick Hill]

I finally decided to try ReiserFS after positive feedback from Tushar.

I nuked mt FAT32(windows) partition. mkreiserfs /dev/hda2

Copied my EXT2 partiton data to the new partition. 

I found the system works noticeably faster with the ReiserFS. At first, I put this down to the partition being nearer the outer edge of the disk (higher rotational velocity/ more data per disk revolution). I found this is not the reason. I copied 100Mb files to /dev/null from both partitions. Both partitions performed identically.

There seems much less disk activity with ReiserFS, and programs load faster. 

It takes 60 seconds to boot to the Gnome desktop with reiser, as opposed to 70 with ext2. (taken from pressing enter at the LILO prompt).

The ext2 partition is 0.7% fragmented. Few of the start-up files are likely fragmented.

ReiserFS obviously caches the location of data on the filesystem better than ext2. Much less time is wasted seeking. 

In summary:
ReiserFS takes 15% off boot time. 
Much less disk seeking in normal use
Programs load faster.
find works much faster on the reiser partition.

These benefits are on top of the better small-file storage and better resilience to corruption.

ReiserFS is worth migrating to!

Regards

Nick.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug