[mythtv] Re:Channel change speed

[Geoffrey Hausheer]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 10:40:52 -0700 (PDT), "Ben Levitt
levittben-at-yahoo.com |mythtv/1.0-Allow|" <00rqhl43yb0t at sneakemail.com>
said:
> I just switched my store from ext3 to reiserfs, and I
> like the change!
> Channel changing time is significantly faster, and
> deleting recordings 
> is
> much faster too.
> 
> Maybe this should be put in the documentation
> somewhere.  I remember
> researching which filesystem to use at the time I was
> setting up my 
> MythTV
> machine, and I couldn't find any definitive answer as
> to which would be
> better in the case of a PVR.

I did some benchmarks on my new system before choosing a fs, and reiserfs
and ext3 are about the same for reading/writing (at least serially).  I
didn't do checks for random seek or deleting.  I initially chose
reiserfs, since it's what I run on many of my other systems, but halfway
through copying my archive back onto the new drive, a (unmarked) bad
block trashed the filesystem.  runing fsck.reiserfs led to a 'Not yet
implemented' message (this is the latest reieserfsprogs), and the drive
wouldn't mount with any set of options I could find.  With no way to get
at the data on the drive, and having nearly lost 100Gigs of data (as I
said I was copying from a temporary archive), I promptly reformatted and
went back to ext3.  For normal recording/playback performance is similar,
even with multiple threads reading and writing, and I expect the ext2/3
tools to be more robust.  To be fair, reiserfs has never given me real
problems in the past, though, so just take this as a single data-point. 
I guess it just goes to show that you might have the best technology, but
without stellar support/debug tools, you can really piss a guy off when
things go awry (LVM falls into this category for me too...Though I still
use it)

.Geoff