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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."

4 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.

      --

      I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.

    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. 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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