[mythtv-users] ext3fs for recordings file system when using slow deletes

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 19:15 -0400, Steven Adeff wrote:
> there are quite a few JFS users on the list too, search the archives,
> the whole xfs vs jfs vs ext3 vs reiser issue has come up a lot (esp.
> around when the incremental delete feature was being realized).

I use XFS, but JFS should work just fine.
I looked into this before and aside from deletes, which are
hopefully addressed by the new slow delete functionality in 0.20,
there were other performance issues with ReiserFS (version 3)
and ext3. They just don't handle large quickly growing files
as well*. AFAIK nothing beats XFS with the journal on a separate
drive from the spindle, but otherwise according to the stats
JFS was as good or better. ReiserFS (v3) and ext3 clocked in
at about half the performance of XFS and JFS, this is fine for
a maybe three analog recordings on a typical drive. According
to the disk benchmarks Reiser4, i.e. not the version in the
kernel, should be just as good for large files as XFS/JFS.

*ext3 can be tuned to work better for video, use 4 MB blocks
instead of 4KB blocks for a start, but then it's performance
falls for typical file system. Reiser4 is better tuned, but
isn't in the Linux kernel yet, and may never be in the kernel.

-- Daniel