Joshua Kugler wrote:
We recently purchases a Coraid Etherdrive, and I have set up a 5TB RAID5 array
that I am going to use for storing Bacula volumes. I always used ext3, but I
know it's not always the most efficient, especially because it doesn't have
dynamic inode allocation, and since these are Bacula volumes we're talking
about, I'll probably have 20 to 40 files on the entire filesystem.
I have no experience with bacula file volumes but we do use large arrays
for enterprise storage. We have had good experience with ext3 although I
understand it is easily outperformed by jfs and xfs.
However, I think writing file volumes is a pretty specialized activity-
there's no huge directories of tiny files, simultaneous operations, or
other things that bog down normal filesystems. Its pretty much straight
disk i/o so I would be surprised if most filesystems didn't perform at
around the same level. It would probably be worth it to do some
benchmarking with different FSs though.
That being said, there are tweeks in every FS that can have a pretty
dramatic effect on performance. For raid 5 on ext3, getting the stride
size right is especially important, usually stride=chunksize/blocksize
gives the best performance (usually blocksize is 4096 on ext3). Also,
since the files will be large, you'd definitely want a big chunk size-
at least 128k. For a raid 5 device with a 128k chunksize, I'd use:
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -R stride=32 /dev/md0
Also, setting a really high 'commit' value when mounting ext3 keeps the
disks from syncing too aggressively and can improve performance. I often
use a mount option of 'commit=9999'.
Hope that helps.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what filesystem I should use, or have
any experience with Bacula and different file systems? Note, this is not
"what is the best filesystem to backup," but "what is the best filesystem to
write volumes to."
Thanks for any tips or ideas!
j----- k-----
--
Theron Toomey, System Administrator
NSEES-IT (919-613-8148)
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