[mythtv-users] Best Filesystem Type?

Jarod Wilson jarod at wilsonet.com
Fri Apr 13 17:59:28 UTC 2007


On Wednesday 11 April 2007 09:46:02 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.
>
> > 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.
>
> I've been using ext3 for 3 years and haven't ever had issues (and for
> the last 6 months, I've had HDTV only--meaning 4-10GiB/hr).  Before slow
> deletes, I'd have a pause for a couple of seconds after a delete, but
> now--due to UI changes and slow deletes--even that's gone.
>
> I delete before, during, and after recordings without issue.  The slow
> deletes make ext3 an excellent choice.

I use ext3 on my mythtv storage array as well, for over a year now. I don't 
even bother with slow deletes while I have two HDTV shows recording and one 
commflagging and it works without a problem, but then I have 8 spindles and a 
hardware raid controller backing my storage array. :)

> > 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.
>
> Totally agree.

Likewise.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com




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