Submitted by شخص خجول مجهول on Mon, 07/06/2004 - 20:37.
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Well, I've been using reiser4 for over 3 months now and using it as my / partition for about a month.

here're some interesting findings.

1. It IS faster than every file system out there, including reiserfs v3.6, no benchmarks but the system starts faster, games load faster, copying files is faster, etc.

2. It handles power going out/computer freezes pretty well (better than reiserfs/ext*).

3. old snapshot in speedy-sources worked fine but mysql database went corrupt randomly under heavy usage and bittorrent/amule had corrupt downloads.

4. new snapshot in love-sources-2.6.7_rc2-r2 locks the computer "after" heavy load (keyword after, not during), for example I can play ut2004 fine but 5 minutes after I finish playing it locks up the computer, although I can usually sync, umount and reboot cleanly with alt+sysrq.

5. I can play enemy-territory just fine, and I can emerge (compile) most stuff just fine, but for example the system locks up "after" emerging php/coreutils.

Other known bugs:

1. glibc/apache have permission problems because of the metas/ feature of reiser4, I've made a fix for that to disable metas/ by default and I'm testing it before i release it to the public.

2. apache randomly goes zombie and makes the "system" use 99% CPU (not apache itself).

Overall reiser4 is definitely a good test-filesystem, but it still needs to be more mature.

I recommend everyone to try it, It is NOT the most stable filesystem out there, but hey I can show you ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs horror stories so nothing is stable enough.

peace


what about JFS

Alaa's picture

yeah except ext2, ext3 horror stories happened for corner cases.

anyways, what about JFS recent benchmarks showed it performed very well (even better than reiser at times) and overall its CPU usage (my main beef with reiser) was lower and it fared well with large files.

also JFS has a good stability record.

tried it at all?

cheers, Alaa


http://www.manalaa.net

hmm no

hmm no, I only know one person that uses it and says its almost as good as reiserfs. but the closest filesystem in overall speed to reiser4 is reiserfs. but i guess i could give jfs a try sometime. thanks for pointing that out peace

Interesting...

YoussefAssad's picture

Really bizarre, these lockups and crashes you describe. Out of curiosity, how'd you suss out that they're FS-related?

-- Linux Egypt Lice Resident

they are known bugs.the way

they are known bugs. the way reiser4 works, it depends too much on memory management and cpu scheduling. with 2.6.7-rc* there have been a lot of changes in both mm and cpu sched, Zam promised us to fix that asap but it's been hard since the lead dev left...

peace

Thats all mind games

Pronco's picture

Thats all mind games. for a box at home you dont need it and for a production environment you need something that proves over months to be reliable

Btw, According to most benchmarks I saw, JFS performed best overall. it was always in the top 2-4 performers

I only know of it from benchmarks, never used it or anything yet


- I'm a code junkie security enthusiast

- http://pronco.manalaa.net

I'm a big JFS fan, use it

Alaa's picture

I'm a big JFS fan, use it on all my desktops and servers.

the best thing about JFS is it has low cpu overhead when compared reiser.

cheers,
Alaa


http://www.manalaa.net "context is over-rated. who are you anyway?"

Is the difference

Pronco's picture

Is the difference significant enough compared to the fast improvement of CPU speeds?


- I'm a code junkie security enthusiast

- http://pronco.manalaa.net

dunno how to answer that,

Alaa's picture

dunno how to answer that, I happen to care about and use old cpus, don't see a reason why developers should stop caring about cpu cycles and ram usage.

the amount of resources consumed by high profile FOSS projects like OO.o, Mozilla* and Apache is nothing short of embaressing. if we end up with extra cpu overhead on the kernel drivers then we're all DOOMED , DOOMED I TELLS YA

cheers,
Alaa


http://www.manalaa.net "context is over-rated. who are you anyway?"

I don't thinks so.

phaeronix's picture

JFS's only strong point is low cpu usage. On a laptop that makes sense because it saves battery time.

It's performance on desktop system is lackluster. Respectable benchmarks always show ext3 and reiser4 on top, depending on the type of data they use. reiser4 is better overall for everyday use, but you need recent, flawless hardware.

You can see those benchmarks released periodically on LKML. Recent 2.6.15 kernels have problems related to IO load which affects most filesystems, specially resier4. I hope they fix this soon.

I don't buy the ext3 is

Alaa's picture

I don't buy the ext3 is faster than JFS argument, ext3 is the slowest FS I ever used.

how recent is recent? ext3 and reiser have been around for years already.

I tend to use ext3 for system partitions though, don't care about the speed on those and somehow ext3 feels safer (never had data loss with ext3 or jfs, had minor ones with reiser) and is supported by all distros, livecds, and such

cheers,
Alaa


http://www.manalaa.net "context is over-rated. who are you anyway?"

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