From: dfox@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us (David Fox) Subject: Re: What's the FASTEST FS? Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1993 02:15:49 GMT
Howlin' Bob (gt8134b@prism.gatech.EDU) wrote:
: In <CBLLr1.oDr@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us> dfox@hip-hop.suvl.ca.us (David Fox) writes:
: >Ed Carp (erc@apple.com) wrote:
: >: What's the FASTEST FS? I know that ext is much slower than ext2, but is minix,
: >: xiafs, or ext2 the fastest?
: >Why, 386BSD's. (Berkeley FFS.)
: Well, this isn't really a useful answer (not that there is one). He
Well, I probably should have inserted a smiley or two on that.
: And do you have numbers comparing xiafs/ext2/FFS on the same hardware
: with comparable aging/fragmentation? I would indeed like to see them.
No, no quatifiable results, sadly. However, I have run 386BSD (for about
10 months prio ro installing Linux), and on my hardware, FFS does feel a
bit faster than even ext2fs. My first choice was Minix fs, and that was
dog-slow compared to FFS.
Until MS-DOG ate the partition table, I had a rather good setup - in fact,
during the ten months, I only lost one file due to improper shutdown/startup
procedures. Seems to me the FFS is quite robust.
Its use of frags can be disoncerting to some; primarily, after a rather
long time in use, the filesystem degrades to the point where holy small files
can be put on the system. For exaple, even if df shows something like 3 megs
free, one can't write a 3 meg file - one can only write smaller files totalling
3 megs.
One thing I would like to see in SLS is a real etc/rc startup procedure that
runs e2fsck upon boot, and if the file system gets modified by it, reboot.
: Robert
: --
: Robert Sanders
: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
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-- David E. Fox email: hip-hop!dfox@amdahl.com 5479 Castle Manor Drive San Jose, CA 95129 Thanks for letting me change the magnetic 408/ 253-7992 images on your hard drive.