[mythtv-users] Best Filesystem Type?

Brian Foddy bfoddy at visi.com
Thu Apr 12 04:58:00 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 11 April 2007 11:59 am, Wil Cooley wrote:
> 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
As Brian Wood said, some have better luck; I guess I'm one of them.
I've been using XFS on a 350GB filesystem for 3-5 years with myth
and never had a single problem filesystem related, currently its on
a software raid0 of 5 drives.  And I regularly let the system reach
within 5gb free and auto erase.  And the time to erase a 15gb file
on a p-1000 machine, maybe 2 seconds.  The only drawback I've
ever seen with XFS is it cannot be shrunk so its not easy to use with
a volume manager and remove space.

Your luck may vary.
Brian


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