Re: [gentoo-user] the best filesystem for server: XFS or JFS (or?)

[Paul Hartman]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
> Jarry wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm looking for "the best" filesystem for a small multi-purpose
>> server with a couple of services running (ftp, web, mail, mysql).
>> For me very important features are:
>>
>> snapshot (will be used for backup, must be native without lvm)
>> journaling
>> resizeable (if possible online)
>>
>> After a little research I have found two candidates:
>> JFS (created by IBM)
>> XFS (created by SGI)
>>
>> Now without trying to start flame-war, my question is:
>> which of them could be better for my need?
>> More stable, more reliable, more efficient, etc.
>> Or should I consider some different filesystem?
>>
>> Jarry
>>
>
> If you use XFS, make sure you have a UPS to prevent hard power offs.  I used
> XFS a good while back, every time the power would fail, it was toast.  I
> never did get it to rescue itself and ended up re-installing the OS.  It may
> have changed but that was my experience with XFS.  It was fast and nice but
> it likes normal shutdowns.

My anecdotal 2 cents:

For JFS, I used it on 2 systems and both were ruined by
crash/power-failure, journal replay failed, repair caused millions of
of JFS files to be renamed to inode number (or equally as useless
filenames). File contents of those were basically okay, but I had no
idea what they were or where they came from. Making an index of all
files in your system with full path and filename, filesize and hash
and storing it on another machine would help to match those files to
their original names in the event of a crash. This was about 5 years
ago so maybe JFS's crash recovery is more robust now, I don't know
because I have avoided it ever since.

I used XFS on a drive which had a bad cable and offlined itself in the
middle of an operation, it wouldn't mount and fsck didn't fix it,
which was scary, but using the xfs tools I was able to repair it
enough to mount read-only and copy all my files off to another disk,
then replaced the cable and reformatted the bad drive. So XFS got
positive marks for being recoverable, negative marks for failing to
recover itself. But in the end I was able to get my files in their
original names and locations, which was better than JFS. :)

Now for the past couple years I use ext4 everywhere and have suffered
dozens of crashes and power failures without incident (laptop with
dead battery and lack of power management, crazy nvidia-drivers
problems on desktop machine, UPS that died during a storm...).

For me, ext4 has been unbreakable so far. Fingers crossed. :)