Greg Lindahl wrote:
On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 08:15:06PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
It has been, realistically, the only serious choice for big/fast
data systems on Linux for quite some time.
Most big/fast data systems don't have big filesystems. In HPC, the
biggest use something like Lustre; in business, the biggest use
something like BigTable/GFS. In both cases the underlying filesystems
don't have to be that big.
We see everything from a few TB through a few PB. Not every cluster FS
we see is Lustre. We have had some interesting conversations about this
with customers in the last several days.
Now for what you really meant ("big filesystems"), that was pretty
true when XFS first came out. But Emacs (oops, I meant ext2) was
improved upon subsequently, and the remaining differences are more a
lifestyle choice than a clear technical choice.
Hmmm... There were people who knew they needed it, people who didn't
think they needed it (but did), and those who didn't need it at all.
The latter group didn't deal with GB sized data sets (or larger), and
often ran the same thing they ran on their desktop as they perceived it
to be "good enough".
Ext3 has some serious
performance limits due to its journaling design. Never mind its other
issues. There was mention of this in this past week's LWN.net.
If you use the default desktop config, yes. This is a common situation
in lifestyle arguments: "performance would be poor if you use product
X like an idiot." It's an ease-of-use problem.
Heh ... as someone who performance tunes the systems and actively
compares the performance ... well ...
... if your use case is rm -rf /dir, sure ext3 is better. If you have
to move and interact with lots of data (GB+ sized loads) on a regular
basis ... and you believe that ext3 is still your friend when you tune
it "optimally", then that, indeed, is a lifestyle choice. Not unlike
living in a shack out in the woods without a bathroom. Real men use
ext3 and use leaves (or don't wipe) ... or something like that.
[sarcasm /]
[...]
Zfs is not the revealed word of some deity, in file systems. This mind
set is painful to deal with, and often winds up with people having
*very* unrealistic expectations of what it is, what it can do, and how
it performs.
Yeah, it almost reminds me of when XFS came out. (Did I say that out
loud?)
You certainly did. Not true, but you are of course welcome to your
opinion. XFS isn't great for everything. We don't use it for
everything. Just where large block sequential performance matters, and
size limits can be a problem.
You're probably a vi user :-)
Nope, not my primary editor, but I will use it over slow connections. I
prefer nedit (scary to think I used a way early version of it to write a
thesis), pico/nano. vim/gvim doesn't suck (vi straight does).
I have never learned the operating system known as emacs. Its simply
too complex for mere mortals. Sort of like sendmail config sequences.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: land...@scalableinformatics.com
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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