On Tuesday 25 November 2008 22:29, "Aneurin Price" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Based on my experience, I would not personally recommend XFS to anyone who > cannot guarantee that their system will absolutely never crash or suffer > power failure. XFS's failure modes seem pretty disastrous. Then again I > never had any problems when I was using reiserfs, so YMMV.
One issue with XFS is that data which is not written synchronously (IE opened with O_DIRECT or O_SYNC) or explicitly synchronised with fsync() may stay in the write-back cache for up to 30 seconds (compared with 5 seconds for Ext2/3). Now for correctly written applications that call fsync() when appropriate this should not be a problem. But for buggy applications this can cause significant problems. One example where this caused a disaster was a program that used the create and rename method of replacing a file. It would often replace the file more than once in 30 seconds. This meant that on XFS the main file and the backup could end up without any data blocks but on Ext3 as the period was >5 seconds it mostly worked. Of course the program in question worked better on Ext3 as well once I put a fsync() call in the source... -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Main Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
