Cabot, Mason B wrote:
I've been testing the NAS performance of ext3/Openfiler 2.2 against NTFS/WinXP and have found that NTFS significantly outperforms ext3 for video workloads. The Windows CIFS client will attempt a poor-man's pre-allocation of the file on the server by sending 1-byte writes at 128K-byte strides, breaking block allocation on ext3 and leading to fragmentation and poor performance. This will happen for many applications (including iTunes) as the CIFS client issues these pre-allocates under the application layer.
This is rather hard to believe so I think some more information is in order. Specifically, how do you know that it is the windows kernel that is issuing these writes and not the application? Under what application access patterns does it do this?
This is just rather hard to believe seeing as how, iirc, the CIFS protocol has commands to extend the file size properly rather than with this hack, and unless it is asked to by the application, the cifs client should not be trying to extend files.
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
