[mythtv-users] Fastest file system

[Brandon Beattie]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:51:09PM -0400, Brian McEntire wrote:
> You guys with the kids and the reset buttons are giving me high blood 
> pressure!! ;-) NO FILE SYSTEM is intended to sustain regular unclean 
> shutdowns. If you get through a few unclean shutdowns, count yourself lucky, 
> but don't rely on it.

No kids here, it is/was purely development reasons for all the kernel panics 
and hard locks.  Someone's got to test things out before they get
released.  The pcHDTV cards that I had (before they went on sale) had
quite a few bugs in them, but I dealt with it so I could get the
HDTV support written for Myth before the cards were released.  
Small price to pay, but it did give me a good chance to test things for
myself.  I also couldn't afford a "dev system" so my production system
is my dev system.  The system has been to about 7 LUG meetings and
traveled close to 1000 miles.  At the last few it has started to act odd
(Hardware boot detection) so it's now retired from that job, and I
highly discourage anyone from doing this.  

I do have a 720VA UPS but we do get power loss for more than 30 minutes
and it has run out of battery several times.  

I've also in quick panics (sudden and major lightning storms) just hard
powered the system off.  Or when I start to smell something hot. ;)

> How about opening up the case and disconnecting the reset switch from the 
> Mobo?
> You could do the same for the power button. Then the kids can press all they 
> want.

Kids should never play with servers I think. :)  Every home should have
a server room with a key lock.  I think I've known more people who have
had computers ruined by spilt drinks than power buttons. ;)

> I guess I haven't tried to delete any 2GB files lately, and I will have to 
> soon... but how slow is it? Does the Mythfrontend interface "hang/pause" 
> while you are waiting for the delete to complete? Could this just be put 
> into the background with '&' to improve the UI response time, if that's the 
> driving factor?

Myth's under interface locks, or it atleast it did last time I tried.
Even with JFS, if I needed to delete 40 shows that occupied 700GB's it
would take about a few minutes.  XFS is instant, so 40 shows takes about
1 minute (as long as you take to select delete).

I know there was talk about marking shows for deletion, and not deleting
them until needed.  I think this went in, but I'm not 100% sure.

If you're not dealing with shows between 5GB-100GB's each, filesystem is
even less important.  

--Brandon