hello: No filesystem is perfect, as each filesystem has its own advantages and disadvantages. it's up to the user to select his filesystem of choice based on the environment which he is to use the filesystem.
My additional observations on the following journalling filesystems ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, as I use them at home as well as at the office... (at home, I have a mixed scheme of filesystems employed in partitions) * ext3 enhances further the ext2 filesystem by introducing the notion of journalling, but at the same time inherits the current limitations of ext2. * in intermittently-powered machines, ext3 and ReiserFS scale good compared to XFS, which has the tendency to develop file holes when used on desktop PCs. [in the university I attend, we have "kiosks" - low end machines with ext3 filesystems. despite being intermittently powered-on/off by students, has been quite resistant to filesystem corruption - though I'm praying that it won't develop hardware errors due to the level of abuse it gets] * for machines used as proxy servers or used as cache systems, ReiserFS is quite good as filesystem transactions are committed faster (faster file delete/update/create rate). * XFS performs better than ReiserFS and ext3 when used on almost-full filesystems. * On small-sized partitions, ReiserFS has a disadvantage of having a constant size journal of 32 MB compared to ext3, but this is quickly-offset as the maximum size is approached, since ext3 journal data adjusts and grows according to the data in the disk (since ext3 journal stores meta data and may also contain file data). * XFS is better in handling very large files (gigabyte size files and bigger) compared to ReiserFS and ext3. XFS is also very good in environments requiring heavy file streaming operations (such as CG/animation, filesystems containing large databases...). Paolo Falcone __________________________________ www.edsamail.com
