[mythtv-users] EXT4 vs XFS

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Mon Nov 14 02:55:05 UTC 2011


On Sun, 2011-11-13 at 18:34 -0500, Scott & Nicole Harris wrote:
> I followed that thread, and it seemed to me that the issue boiled down to 
> not really an "ext4" thing per-say but having the correct mount options for 
> ext4 AND (more importantly?) properly configuring MySQL. 

Both ext4 and XFS are more prone to data loss with the nobarrier
mount option than ext3. So ext3 is a better file system to use for
the partition containing your database and your /etc and /var/log
and /home directories. You should still mount that partition with
nobarrier,noatime for decent performance with recent kernels.

ext4 and XFS should both work acceptably for the recording disks even
with barriers enabled. But XFS will win out on a number of metrics
which may matter if you have a lot of recorders or a large number of
concurrently active frontends. Meanwhile ext3 is not a good filesystem
for the disk[s] containing your recordings, primarily because it can
take a really long time to delete old files and is more prone to
fragmentation.

I am actually surprised at how well XFS has held up over the years.
It hasn't changed much in at least the last decade and was designed
almost two decades ago, the company that created it doesn't exist
anymore, but it's better than both the newer ext4 and BRTFS file
systems in all real world tests. It probably speaks to the chops of
the engineers who designed it.

-- Daniel



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