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> Just search for benchmarks, something like reiserfs beats ext2 by huge margins

You mean like these ones where ext2 beats reiserfs in most cases and is at least as fast in the others?

> I hope you're joking. ext2 is nice and simple, but it's neither fast not reliable.
> It uses a linear search to find directory entries, which means it's very slow on
> large directories, like Maildir mailboxes.

Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around huge mail servers. Some of us actually run Linux on a desktop, and so don't really care about how well an fs handles a million maildir mailboxes. Latency is the most important criteria, and reiserfs is just too complicated to deliver it, as well as being a largely fringe fs. Especially now with Hans gone, it would become even more fringe.

> It doesn't do tail packing which means it wastes space and is slower with small files.

Yup, I'd like to have efficient small file handling. But really, it is better to avoid having many small files in the first place. Use compressed archives to store such things; it's quite a bit more efficient, and does not require exotic file systems which most normal people (i.e. your customers) will not use.

> It's not reliable because without a journal it needs a fsck after a bad shutdown

I used to do that, and then I got a UPS instead and switched back to pure ext2. The performance hit from journalling is simply too high to tolerate. A decent UPS (pretty much anything made by APC) will prevent the crashes in the first place, solving the problem completely and without any unnecessary overhead. With UPS prices being as low as they are, there is no excuse for not having one, so I think that journalling will become obsolete in some near future.

This one is pretty old review back when Reiser4 was still Experimental. More recent one would be here, but it too is over a year old.

3. WTF was he doing keeping the servers *in* the US. As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s and who really thinks that that American Revoultion was one of the best things to ever happen to mankind is sickens me to say this. But the US is rapidly descending into totalitarianism. If you think about it for about .3 seconds you come to the conclusion that you should seek hosting in another country, by prefrence one that has no extradition treaty.

But I'm just a little paranoid from reading too much history. If I were hosting an anarchist site, you bet I'd have it set up in the Cayman Islands or somewhere far away from the FBI's clutches. Then I'd only have to worry about the CIA.

Benchmark comparing virtually every major file system against each other. They are fairly old, but I doubt things have changed significantly since they were run.

fsbench.netnation.com

For all those that are looking for a filesystem comparison, I found this story to be quite interesting...or go here for the test details and results.

2.6.0-test7 was a good 2% faster across the board on file system benchmarks then 2.6.0-test5, lets hope test8 continues that trend.

Benchmarks for both test7, and test8 will be posted on that site within the next week for all those interested in getting the maximum performance out of your Linux box.

Just look at the second table! See the upside down cross?! Bobby Bouchet, FILE SYSTEMS ARE THE DEVIL!

Um, no it's not. If you look at their web page, it's a 450 MHz PII:

vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 451.018
cache size : 512 KB

In fact, I'm pretty sure it's a Pentium II Xeon (the server version of the processor), since the desktop processors have only 256K of cache. My machine at home happens to have two of the same PII Xeons:

vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 5
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 448.058
cache size : 512 KB

So, while it's not speed monster, this is not that slow of a CPU.

Netnation.com has decent pricing and the best damn support you'll come across. If your having a network problem, you can simply call up and ask for "NOC" and you'll be talking with a senior network engineer in a matter of minutes.

Not to mention they are on the NASDAQ (NNCI) and have been turning an increasing profit every quarter for more then a year. Pretty impressive in this economy.

www.netnation.com

At the last company I worked for we used transformers as our naming convention. There are plenty of names available and you can get fairly creative with using the names:

All NT machines can be decepticons because they are evil, and all UNIX machines can be Autobots becuase they are friendly.

Your biggest UNIX machine can be Optimus and your biggest NT machine can be Megatron.

Your tape library can be Soundwave because he was the transformer that you put tapes into.

Your entire NOC can spend a fun filled afternoon debating naming decisions. It is a fun waste of time!

One that I know of which is very good is NetNation.

They've got locations in Vancouver, Sandiego and London. I've got 2 boxes at the Vancouver facility, and used to run off their hosted servers. The service has been great, and the uptime has be perfect. Hope that'll help.

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