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Mark Knecht schrieb: |
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> Hi, |
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> I'm wondering if anyone has opinions (on this list? Right...) as to |
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> the best file system type for running vmware images of Windows XP. As |
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> best I can tell an 8GB C: drive shows up as 4x 2GB files and 1.5GB |
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> DRAM is modeled in a file of its own: |
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> |
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[...]I suspect XFS, Reiser or |
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> something other than ext3 that I'm currently using would possibly make |
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> a difference? |
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> |
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> But would it be a big difference? How would I test it? I.e. - not |
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> that XFS is or isn't a good file system but that it actually helps |
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> with vmware operation? |
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> |
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> My current system is AMD64, 4GB DRAM, i5 Core which is 4 processor |
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> threads. Target machine is AMD64, i7 Core or possibly dual XEON, 16GB, |
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> 4-6 monitors and multiple 1TB+ drives in some sort of RAID mainly for |
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> speed, and then additionally an external RAID for backup. |
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> |
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As an educated guess, I would say that ext4's usage of extents should |
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improve the performance on large files by a measurable margin. |
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As one of the last filesystem drivers which still use the Big Kernel |
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Lock, I would also guess that Reiserfs might not scale well to heavily |
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multithreaded usage or multicore CPUs. However, I cannot say if this has |
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any kind of noticable effect on 4-8 core machines. |
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As Roberto Waltman already suggested, benchmarking is the way to go. |
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By the way, as you mention RAID. Note that on pure read operations, a |
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RAID1 can be as good or even better than a RAID0 because read operations |
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can be distributed freely among the disks since all of them contain all |
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data. |
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|
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Hope this helps |
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Florian Philipp |
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