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Reiser4 Benchmarks
unmadindu writes "Hans Reiser has benchmarked Reiser4 against ext3 and Reiserfs 3. Reiser4 turns out to be way faster than V3, and for ext3, why don't you check out the results yourself ? Hans Reiser states, "these benchmarks mean to me that our performance is now good enough to ship V4 to users", and he will be probably sending in a patch within the next couple of weeks to be included in the 2.6/2.5 kernel."
hey, I can live with an unstable gnome or Kicq, but a beta filesystem?? no thanks dude!
After reiser4, what filesystems are actually decent competition for it? It'd be nice for OSS to claim not only the best web server (apache), best kernel, and best filesystem.
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The statistics on that page are measured in seconds, no? So larger numbers are worse.
The comparisons are done with [foreign filesystem] divided by reiser4.
One would think that numbers greater than one, where the foreign filesystem has a long running time and reiser4 a short one, would be the ones that benefit reiser4.
Yet the numbers *less* than one are green, where Hans says reiser4 is considered better.
What's going on?
(Incidently, after having a friend lose a filesystem to buggy reiser code, I'm a bit inclined to wait until people have *seriously* hammered on this).
May we never see th
While great, this announcement/benchmark/statement does not mean that ReiserFS V4 is ready for production use, just that it is fast. It needs a lot more bug testing before then, so don't rush out and mass-convert to V4 just yet! See here for the full thread, rather than just the first post...
* Several monkeys are here, playing banjos and wearing small hats.
Exactly. RAM, CPU, and storage space are ever increasing. Now we need better ways to organize data, access it, protect it, and back it up.
The fact of the matter is, it is easier to make a fast system than a stable, reliable one.
It's still not time to swap it for ext3 for general use.
The first table with the mixed file sizes is the most compelling. The fact that reiser4's Create and Copy times are less than a third of the ext3s in real_time is impressive.
But the fact that the CPU consumption on Read is double that for R4 as it is for ext3 is a serious problem. On a 1.3 Ghz machine saturating a generic UDMA 100 60G bus on RH 9.0 it's about 10% of the CPU, so the home user might not care. For a system capable of delivering serious data (like a 4 drive, 15k rpm SCSI RAID array @~3 times the read throughput) going from 30% CPU to 60% CPU usage is a definite problem. Even with a 2.6 Ghz cpu it would still move from chewing up 15% to 30%. I know these numbers don't scale exactly, but they could in fact scale ugly depending on how much CPU is dedicated to communicating with the hardware and how much is in fiddling with the filesystem. My production boxes spend > 80% of their disk activity reading, so I'm not yet inspired to go out and spend the time running benchmarks on highperf. systems just yet.
Nevertheless, I always admire it when a new version of software comes out and it's noticeably faster than the old
It is important that you use a distro that bases their kernel on 2.4.18, or later, when using ReiserFS. There exists a distro that bases their enterprise server kernel on 2.4.9, and intentionally declines to add any reiserfs bugfixes since then. (This is the same distro that once shipped their kernel with the ReiserFS debugging code turned on so that we would go slow.) Do NOT use their kernel with ReiserFS. Generally when someone reports that they are having really bad experiences with ReiserFS, it turns out they are using that kernel.
I generally recommend using the latest official kernel from Marcelo, and not any distro kernels, but the SuSE kernels tend to have effective ReiserFS support also, and not everyone out there shares my non-technical preference for a common community developed kernel.
Root is a prime candidate for a small (100MB should do it) ext2 system mounted "sync". You don't need decent write performance on root; in fact, many sysadmins make it read-only. Journalling is pointless if you're only writing to the filesystem once every 6 months to add a new user.
On the contrary, that's exactly the case where you should always journal, and with full data journalling. You don't care about write performance, since you hardly ever do it, but you do care at lot about keeping your root filesystem consistent.
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