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XFS on a Web Server?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-well-would-it-work dept.

WWYD asks: "I am going to be setting up a fresh web server for the company I work for and am looking for some advise. It will be a Redhat 7.3 / Apache / PHP standard everyday setup that will be hosting 50+ radio station sites. My question is about SGI's XFS file system. I've been running it at home and love the recovery time after the system dies. (I experiment a lot). Would XFS be a good filesystem for a web server?"

4 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Re:ReiserFS would be good by Leknor · · Score: 2, Informative

    For a butt load of small files I think you'll find ReiserFS faster but for total throughput of data XFS wins hands down. I've done some bench marks on a spare disk where I formatted it with XFS and run bonnie++ and then formatted it with ResierFS and and bonnie++. With XFS I got just shy of 20megs/sec on the bulk io tests and with ResierFS I got 17megs/sec. For lots of small files ReiserFS was faster but I don't remember by how much.

    If will have larger than usual files for a web site then I suggest XFS. If you don't then I'm less opinionated on the topic.

  2. Running on an intranet web server/samba server by Bravo_Two_Zero · · Score: 5, Informative

    I use XFS on an intranet web server and samba server with positive results. It's an older kernel (I needed the ACL kernel patches so the NT domain ACLs would work with samba), so I don't have to recover from crashes. But, performance-wise, I have no complaints. Granted, I have a fraction of the traffic that your site would have.

    I also followed Daniel Robbin's advice on XFS (which you've no doubt read already, but just in case: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-fs10.html

    --


    Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.

  3. Re:Why not use ext3? by g4dget · · Score: 5, Informative
    After a hard crash and an unclean reboot with ext3, I would consistently lose data on open files,

    As you should--that's the way it's supposed to work by default. If you want it to work differently, you need to configure it differently. You get three choices for what is recoverable. That's two more than most other journalling file systems give you.

    and at times, my journal was, at times,(seemingly) corrupt, and I would have to boot into single user mode and manually fsck the disk, which took forever.

    It can happen, I suppose, but I haven't noticed it, and I crash machines with ext3 a lot.

  4. XFS "Unstable"? Nope. by elbles · · Score: 2, Informative

    While many people here have commented, suggesting that XFS may not be as stable as Ext3 or ReiserFS, but, in fact, it is just as stable, if not more so. Before SGI does a release, an unbeliveable amount of testing is done to ensure that the code works without failure, and in my experience, it does. I personally run it on my servers, with one at home that handles all of my large files (MP3's, Photoshop BMP's, lots of other stuff), and it's noticeably faster than Reiser, with no loss in stability. I'd recommend it, based upon experience, rather than some of those people out there who seem to "deface" (for lack of a better word in my mind) XFS without even using it, save for the 1st post I saw. Hope that helps . . .