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Reiser4 Benchmarks

Posted by michael on from the little-things-mean-a-lot dept.

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."

18 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Reliability by prestwich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My one concern is reliability and recovery from failure; I've had a few cases where my belief in ReiserFS has been questioned; however I can't get Ext3 to build on larger than 500GB arrays.

    At this point I'd happily choose based on reliability/recoverability/stability not raw speed.

    1. Re:Reliability by cvd6262 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      We had a massive failure of our primary database server while I was out of the country. (Trust me, nothing puts a damper on your day more than having one of your techs call you at midnight from 7,000 miles away.) I blame Reiser. Not because it caused the outage (it was hardware), but because it was so good, it made us a bit lax.

      We're just a small grant lab at a university, so it's not like this was a corporate system or anything, and there had been hardware problems before. Given that most of the people are not techies, they did not know how to ssh in and shutdown -r now, so they would just hit the reset button whenever they thought something was wrong and I wasn't around.

      Anyway, because of Reiser's journalling, the system would come right back up after a forced reboot. I think that the guys in the lab cut the power a couple of times to many and the hard drive just gave out.

      By the way, I just had a tech install a new drive, and Debian base with ssh. I knew the password he would use for root, and I was able to rebuild the entire system and restored 250,000 records in half a day.... From North Africa.

      Try that with a non-*nix.

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    2. Re:Reliability by Billings · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, you won't lose files, but you'll lose data. It's been noted elsewhere in this article's comments in more technical jargon, but it is a known flaw in ReiserFS that blocks of data can be written to flat out wrong areas. As an example, I had an outage while I was working with my config files and running an apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade. Reiser then managed to write the middle of a debian package file to whatever config file I was working with.

      Had me confused to hell until I saw a newsgroup discussion that mentioned the exact problem I was having. Does Hans Reiser know about this problem? Oh, yeah. He does. Is he concerned about it? No, he's not. In his own words he's not. And ReiserFS fails silently; you'll never know until you find it.

      When I setup ReiserFS on my machine, I was aware of similar complaints, but I dismissed them as fear of trying something unproven. And I was happy with ReiserFS for quite awhile, because I never saw anything wrong (unlike ext2/3). But I really can't support a FS that has these kinds of data integrity issues if the team has that kind of attitude towards them.

  2. Conversion? by avalys · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone know if there will be a conversion utility available - i.e, to convert ReiserFS v3 partitions to v4?

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    1. Re:Conversion? by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hans - How is scalability? SGI seems to think that ReiserFS doesn't scale at all with multiple CPUs, unlike ext2. At least according to the paper they presented at the Ottawa linux symposium last month:

      (see page 9 of this PDF for the graph)

      The implication is a lack of fine-grain locking. Does this new all-atomic, all-the-time implementation automagically bring better locking too?

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  3. Honest Portability Question by jstockdale · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am curious as to whether there are any projects to port Reiser4 to *BSD, particularly FreeBSD 5.x. Does anyone have any thoughts on how difficult a port might be? Can somone more versed in filesystems on *nix enlighten me as to the implimentation differences?

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  4. Re:ok by ElGuapoGolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You'll probably have to compile it in yourself for now.

    RH probably will include it in the future, but probably won't give you the option to install on it without jumping thru major hoops.

    RH seems to suffer from a big case of "not-invented-here-itis", and RH users sometimes suffer for it. Not having ReiserFS is one way in which they do.

  5. Which to choose for DBs? by Openadvocate · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I realise that it is a bit early to adopt V4, but stable issues aside, which filesystem would YOU choose to for database volumes for fx. Oracle or MySQL?

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  6. XFS? by leoboiko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How does it compare against everyone's favorite, XFS?

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  7. but will it make it by DemiKnute · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So he's submitting it to 2.6, but what are the chances it'll get submitted? Isn't this what caused all of Reiser's bitching a couple of years ago? He waited to long to get RFS into the kernel and ran into the feature freeze, and then pitched a hissy fit.

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    1. Re:but will it make it by Nothinman · · Score: 3, Interesting
      not many people are going to use 2.6.0, and I'm sure V4 will make it into 2.6.1. The wait will be what, like a month?

      The point is that unless reiser4 is 100% self contained and stable it shouldn't make it into 2.6 at all now because there's been a feature freeze and a new filesystem and anything else it adds to the kernel are features. Hans waited too long, again, and technically reiser4 shouldn't be included in the standard/Linus kernel until 2.7 now.

      XFS wasn't allowed to be included in 2.4 officially because of those reasons but the SGI developers didn't cry about it, they just kept their patches up to date and waited for 2.5 to start so they could get included.

      If the filesystem is actually stable and has real benefits over ext3, XFS, JFS, etc it'll probably be patched into distros like RedHat anyway so it's not a huge deal.

  8. Filesystems for the laptop user? by niko9 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anybody know what, if any, features are being added for the laptop user? Last time a checked, journaled filesystems, like ext3, were generally a no-no if you wanted you battery to last.

    Maybe a filesystem just for laptop/tablet pc users?

  9. Which is best? by Dodge+This · · Score: 3, Interesting
    OK so there seems to have been a lot of Reiser flaming going on here, so what would people recommend? Taking into account Speed, Reliability and Compatability.

    I know a lot of people will pull their hair out when they hear this, but: Speed is my primary concern. On long compiles of new programs or kernels for example the speed difference on a good FS can be important. I'm not saying that I'm willing to have a FS that corrupts every last file and directory, only that given two FSs which both have seemingly similar stability I would prefer the speed boost.

    I have tried one or two of the FSs but I haven't used them for any length of time to be able to compare one against another.

  10. ext2? by Coneasfast · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know ext2 isn't a journal fs, but it would still be interesting to see a direct comparison again reiser4.

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  11. In other news... by wirelessbuzzers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Apple benchmarked their new G6 processor against the latest 10 GHz Pentium V. They say that despite its lower clock speed, it runs their suite of PhotoShop 8 filters almost four time faster than the Pentium.

    Seriously, Hans Reiser is benchmarking his own file system, and he's using benchmarks that make his system look good. Like the SpriteLFS, his filesystem has a log structure for sequential writing, which makes it look really good in tests like he performed where you write the files once.

    Compare a database load, where you write small chunks of big files all the time. Without the repacker (like the cleaner in LFS), the disk becomes horribly fragmented. With the repacker, you have to include the slowdown of this background process defragging your hard disk. Ick.

    I'll trust his benchmarks when he presents a final, stable release, with the repacker on, and tests it under workloads such as would be encountered on a server. I might use it on my homebox even if it sucks on a server, but it would be nice to know that he considers his structure's impact on other workloads.

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  12. Re:Computer's names translation by hansreiser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    These are the names of the two dogs that were sent into outerspace by Russia.

  13. Re:Patch for FreeBSD request?? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Hans. Thanks for all your cool fs work. I have a request. Would you be interested in porting Reiser to other os's and maybe creating a bsd licensed version for them?

    I like the UFS2 FS for FreeBSD. Its stable but a little sluggish. I think it would be cool to have internal competition but the MS GPL == viral crap has made a dent into the BSD developers. They fear linking to anything gpl would make their kernel gpl as well.

    Anyway this is just a pretty please with a cherry on top. Especially since you are being paid for by grants from DARPA who use Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and every Unix os under the sun.

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  14. Re:some questions abou ReiserFS by hansreiser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I get reports (not verified by me) that ReiserFS V3 is an order of magnitude faster when used as a backend for an XML database than relational databases that were tried. So, if your data happens to have a hierarchical structure, or, you can put it into one, then you are likely to get a performance gain. If your data does not have a hierarchical structure, then you need to wait for V6 where we plan to expand the semantics.

    If you want to be able to "cat filenameX/..owner" to see who owns "filenameX", you need to use V4.