Re: [gentoo-user] XFS FileSystem - Slow Writes - GNOME/nautilus Issue?

[Joshua Schmidlkofer]

On 8/29/06, Ow Mun Heng <Ow.Mun.Heng@×××.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 18:35 -0700, Richard Fish wrote:
> > On 8/29/06, Ow Mun Heng <Ow.Mun.Heng@×××.com> wrote:
> > > $ mount  | grep xfs
> > > /dev/hda6 on /home type xfs (rw)
> >
> > Hmm, I missed this before.  "nobarrier" should be showing up here.  Try:
> >
> > mount /home -o remount,nobarrier
> >
>
> I did mention that I tried that as well. (but I just re-tried it anyway)
> and it didn't have any changes.

I don't think it's a good idea.  Do you know what the write barriers
provide?   They give you a much higher chance of no damage if you are
able ot run with barriers.  The only real danger to an XFS partition
is out-of-order commits (and of course massive hardware failure).
Write barriers prevent out-of-order journal vs. FS commits, and that
is a Good Thing(tm).


They are only in as of 2.6.17 for XFS.

>
> Out of curiousity, I just tried to copy a file using an xterm (instead
> of using nautilus) from DIsk 2 to disk1
>
> disk2/partition2 - VFAT
> disk1/partition6 - XFS partition (/home)
>
>
> $ ls -lah WinXP-000001-cl1-000001-cl1-000001-s002.vmdk
> -rwxrwxrwx  1 root root 620M Aug 29 19:10
> WinXP-000001-cl1-000001-cl1-000001-s002.vmdk
>
> $ time cp WinXP-000001-cl1-000001-cl1-000001-s001.vmdk ~/Desktop/
> real    0m37.353s
> user    0m0.157s
> sys     0m5.445s
>
>
> Transfer rate ~16.8MB/s

I read an article recently (<2 years ago , heh)  about how Nautilus,
mc, Cp and other OSS copy utilities suffer from a lack of real
intuitive optimization work.  They highlighted the GNU cp command.
Overall copying with Linux tends to be lack luster.  It's services we
do well.  i.e. Http, SQL, etc.  So, that begs the question: Are there
any good, well optimized file copy utilities for Linux?

>
> Using Nautilus (I don't know of a good way to measure throughput using
> this, so it's basically what I see in the progress bar
> ~5min
> gkrellm2 notes transfer rate ~2.0MB/s
>
>
> However, doing the same thing to my /tmp directory (ext3 partition) the
> same file copies in ~30secs and w/ ~17MB/s transfer rate.
>
> What gives??
>
>
> BTW, what's the difference between mc and mc-mp??
>
> *  app-misc/mc
>       Latest version available: 4.6.1
>       Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
>       Size of downloaded files: 11,606 kB
>       Homepage:    http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/
>       Description: GNU Midnight Commander cli-based file manager
>       License:     GPL-2
>
> *  app-misc/mc-mp [ Masked ]
>       Latest version available: 4.1.40_pre9
>       Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
>       Size of downloaded files: 2,904 kB
>       Homepage:    http://mc.linuxinside.com/cgi-bin/dir.cgi
>       Description: GNU Midnight Commander cli-based file manager. 4.1.x
> branch
>       License:     GPL-2

>From the URL:
"The goal of this project is creating a stable, well-working, usefull
console-only version of well-known Midnight Commander, without bugs
and garbage, like tk, xv and gnome. I'm bored waiting for bugfixes,
and A'rpi's ESP team stops their work in this direction too, so I did
it. I'm fixing all (found) bugs, reported by my friends, and made some
really pleasent new features, like real-time clock, or filegroups
colorizing."

 Basically, this guy is sane, (thank God), and doing what MC really
needs: SIMPLICITY.  I have never bitched at the mc guys, but when I
get to my desk, I am converting to mc-mp.  Cause MC sucks recently.
-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list