[Gllug] Slow machine

[Russell Howe]

On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 06:51:53PM +0100, Chris Bell wrote:

>    Do not use a journalling filesystem for a "multimedia" partition, and if
> possible make it a single partition on a separate fast disc.

For large 'multimedia' partitions with lots of large files, XFS seems
quite appropriate to the task... (unless you have a multi-terabyte
filesystem on a 32bit machine - then you can find you don't have enough
RAM to run xfs_repair if everything blows up!)

Then again, XFS only journals the filesystem data, not the actual file
data itself (so dentries, xattrs, file modes and ownership etc are
journalled, but not the data within the files), so if you were talking
about filesystems which journal data, I could perhaps understand.

Still, I don't see that even a data journalling filesystem should
affect read performance too much...

If you're doing things like video capture, where you're writing data
sequentially and needing to happen at a guaranteed rate, then
having fancy things like journalling getting in the way is probably a
bad idea, but this is what O_DIRECT's for, right? :)

Modern hard drives do all sorts of fancy stuff under the hood anyway, so
I shouldn't think it's possible to guarantee anything about the
timeliness of data writes, unless you were to use specialist kit (such
kit would likely suck for general purpose use, too!)

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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