[Nottingham] Filesystems: ReiserFS3.6 vs ext4 vs XFS (& ZFS?)

[Martin]

Richard Ward wrote:
> Jim Moore wrote:
>> As to ReiserFS, the only real advantage I find of that over ext4 over
>> multiple physical volumes is the ludicrous speed with which ReiserFS
>> seemed to be able to access directories with several hundred to
>> several tens of thousands of files. Not very useful if you're only  using it to run a home system
> 
> I have noticed a big difference when doing certain things on a home 
> system using reiser, and I assume it is for the reason you mention. For 
> example bash auto completion seemed much faster when I was using reiser, 
> now I am on ext4 it can take 3 or 4 seconds when I press tab in a bash 
> shell (I have about 4000 files in my $PATH). The way packages are 
[---]

That, and the trick of efficiently handling small files, are two reasons 
why I've stayed with ReiserFS3.6 for so long.

How good is XFS for handling thousands of files in one directory?


For your example with ext4, have you got the H-trees disabled?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htree

"An HTree is a specialized version of a B-tree. They are constant depth 
of either one or two levels, have a high fanout factor, use a hash of 
the filename, and do not require balancing[1]. Htree indexes are used in 
the ext3 and ext4 Linux filesystems, and were incorporated into the 
Linux kernel around 2.5.40."


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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