[mythtv-users] FS for backend

Gary Buhrmaster gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com
Sun Sep 14 16:52:12 UTC 2014


On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 11:06 AM, Josu Lazkano <josu.lazkano at gmail.com> wrote:
.....
> Any recommendation?

In the beginning.... ext2/3 had a number of issues (in particular
very slow deletion due to the requirements to update a large mount
of metadata) that made its use "interesting" for MythTV.  The
Slow Deletes option was/is a partial solution.  So were alternative
file systems such as JFS and XFS.  Depending on distro, use of
those filesystems could be problematic (not included in the base,
or required special setup, or special tools, or special expertice).

Times have changed.  Disks have gotten bigger, and both
faster and slower (depending on what you are requesting).
Operating systems have changed (some) defaults.  And
alternatives such as ext4 and btrfs are now available, both
of which address different sets of issues, and in particular,
both file systems use extent allocation, making deletions
much much faster.

AFAIK there has not been a repeat of the extensive studies
as to which file system is "best" for MythTV that were done
earlier in the decade by a few people, although you can still
find various filesystem benchmarks out there.  Anecdotal
reports of "best" are unreliable without a serious study, although
you can get an idea of what other people use from the (unreliable)
smolt data being collected at
  http://smolt.mythtv.org/static/stats/stats.html
(select filesystems).

That data suggests overwhelmingly ext4 is the choice by most.
And there are few reports of substantially bad performance due
to that choice, so it is probably a reasonable choice for most.

Personally, if I am storing MythTV data (which is "only TV")
on Linux I have used ext4.  It just works.  If I care about the
data more seriously, I use ZFS on an ECC protected server.

Gary


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