[mythtv-users] Best Filesystem Type?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Wed Apr 11 14:10:17 UTC 2007


On Apr 11, 2007, at 7:46 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:

> On 04/11/2007 03:36 AM, Brian Wood wrote:
>> On Apr 10, 2007, at 11:21 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:
>>> Robert Current wrote:
>>>
>>>> I was reading about MythTV for a few days before installing, and I
>>>> read because of the file size, ext2 and ext3 were not great  
>>>> choices,
>>>> but JFS was great...
>>> The main problem with ext3 is deletes of large files block access
>>> to the filesystem while they're in progress.  MythTV has a  
>>> workaround for
>>> this called "slow deletes" that solves the problem.
>>>
>> It "solves" the  problem only if Myth is the only program performing
>> deletes on that filesystem.
>>
>
> But if you're using anything else to delete MythTV recordings, you're
> leaving orphans in the DB.  The /only/ thing that should ever delete
> MythTV recordings is MythTV.
>
> If you store other things on the same drive, you could have issues,  
> but
> chances are those other things are far smaller than MythTV recordings.
> Of course, if you do have other large things to store (i.e. ripped DVD
> ISO's in MythVideo, etc.), putting them on another drive is the best
> solution, anyway.  The only reason the MythTV recordings are typically
> put in the same drive/volume is because of its ability to write to  
> only
> one recording directory, and the same doesn't apply to MythVideo.  The
> new-for-0.21-when-it's-released Storage Groups feature will make  
> proper
> filesystem design easier, but I'm running my Myth box with 3TB of
> storage on 5 HDD's on 2 backends and I don't use any type of MD
> (LVM/RAID/...) and don't yet have Storage Groups.  See  
> myth_archive_job.pl.

Everything you say is correct. I just wanted to point out that if you  
are storing large files other than Myth recordings on the same ext3  
filesystem, and some other program is deleting them, you could  
possibly get into trouble, as you pointed out.

The slow deletes was a great idea, but like all such "fixes" it is  
not a panacea for all types of potential problems.

Brian Wood
beww at beww.org





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