[mythtv-users] ext3 suitability (Was: Re: Block size for ext3 partition)
Keith Pyle
kpyle at austin.rr.com
Wed Jan 23 04:13:03 UTC 2008
>> On Jan 20, 2008, at 7:46 AM, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Jan 20, 2008 8:06 AM, William Munson <w.munson at comcast.net> wrote:
>>> Phill Edwards wrote:
>>>
>>>> In order to make it easier to install CentOS I am going to
>>>>
>>> reformat my
>>>
>>>> JFS file system which stores my recordings to EXT3. It's a 320GB IDE
>>>> disk. The archives have lots of file system discussions but I can't
>>>> find anything which says what block size to format the EXT3
>>>>
>>> partition
>>>
>>>> with for storing large files like recordings. Can anybody advise?
>>>>
>>> Just a note, I've been using JFS for a *long* time without issues.
>>>
>
> I will second this.
>
> EXT3 was painful. Running JFS has been much better for my recordings drive.
>
I've read the comments about ext3 vs. other filesystems with interest
for some time. I've seen a number of comments such as the one above
suggesting difficulties with ext3. I've had no such issues. My
mythbackend has two 250 GB SATA 2 drives connected to separate channels
on an Intel D945 motherboard that has 1 GB memory. Each drive has the
first ~1200 cylinders partitioned to support the typical OS filesystems
(each major filesystem in its own partition, of course) and swap. The
remaining ~29K cylinders on each drive are considered physical volumes
in a LVM volume group. The volume group uses a 64 MB extent size and
contains one logical volume that is configured striped, with a 128 KB
stripe size (i.e., lvcreate -i 2 -I 128 -r 32...) The logical volume
contains an ext3 filesystem created with the following mkfs options:
-b 4096 -O sparse_super -m 0 -T largefile4
to yield a ~440 GB filesystem for myth use. The large VG extent size
would allow a volume group of up to 4 TB, and the stripe configuration
causes LVM to alternate writes between the two disks (this is very
apparent on I/O monitors). While largefile4 does reduce the number of
files that can exist, the 110K inodes in this filesystem are far more
than enough for video use, with typically a percent or two used with the
disk nearly full. The video filesystem is mounted with the noatime and
commit=30 options. These options eliminate unnecessary access time
updates to the filesystem (that would be almost constant otherwise) and
increase the time between sync operations. I recognize that LVM does
not provide the protection of RAID-5, but I do not feel the need for
RAID protection with the backend.
The reason for both disks having the first section for OS is that this
allows the parallel installation of two different OS versions, making
for fairly easy upgrades and back-out if needed. At any time though,
the active OS and the mysql database reside only one disk.
The backend has two PVR-500's, and I've proven that I can record four SD
shows concurrently while watching a fifth (previously recorded) program
using a MediaMVP accessing the backend video partition via NFS. This is
with no drops, stutters, etc. in any of the recordings in spite of the
considerable I/O. I also delete while recordings are in progress with
no problems. I do not have slow deletes enabled. I see no issues with
mysql updating the seek table.
My point is that while the choice of filesystem can be a factor, there
are many other aspects to performance and ext3 is not by itself a bad
choice in a well designed system.
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