[mythtv-users] Best Filesystem Type?

Wil Cooley wcooley at nakedape.cc
Wed Apr 11 16:59:25 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 01:36 -0600, Brian Wood wrote:

> But having said that, I've been using an EXT3 filesystem for over a  
> year with no problems, I'm just careful about not deleting anything  
> over an hour long if a recording is happening.
> 
> The main thing about EXT3 is that the Linux support for it is stable  
> as heck and very well de-bugged on all platforms. Every other  
> filesystem is a crapshoot IMHO, even though they work well for a lot  
> of folks.

One can also tune ext3's performance.  I have a new setup and watching
live TV was almost unusable due to the common "NVP: prebuffering pause"
problem.  I reviewed how my ext3 filesystem was created and realized I
had horribly non-optimal parameters--1024b blocks and a 4MB journal.
(I'd created a small /video file system just to get MythDora to install,
expecting to extend it with LVM later.)

I recreated the filesystem with 4k blocks, a journal of 384MB and with
the 'largefile' option (which uses an inode_ratio of 1 inode/MB).
Performance is now acceptable, even with the default 'data=ordered'
mount option and 5s commit.  I did all of this last night, so I have not
had a chance to experiment with these parameters.  Here is the command
line I used:

mke2fs -j -J size=384 -L /video -m 2 -b 4096 -O dir_index -T largefile /dev/rootvg/videolv

It's also possible to increase the journal size if it's too small; I
have notes about how to determine the journal size and change it on my
wiki:

http://nakedape.cc/wiki/PlatformNotes_2fLinuxNotes

Wil



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