Brandon Black wrote:
>
>
> On 9/12/05, *PFC* <lists@boutiquenumerique.com
> <mailto:lists@boutiquenumerique.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
> - benchmarking something else than ext3
> (xfs ? reiser3 ?)
>
>
> We've had bad experiences under extreme and/or strange workloads with
> XFS here in general, although this is the first major postgresql
> project - the rest were with other applications writing to XFS. Bad
> experiences like XFS filesystems "detecting internal inconsistencies"
> at runtime and unmounting themselves from within the kernel module
> (much to the dismay of applications with open files on the
> filesystem), on machines with validated good hardware. It has made me
> leary of using anything other than ext3 for fear of stability
> problems. Reiser3 might be worth taking a look at though.
Just one tidbit. We tried XFS on a very active system similar to what
you describe. Dual opterons, 8GB memory, fiber channel drives, 2.6
kernel, etc. And the reliability was awful. We spent a lot of time
making changes one at a time to try and isolate the cause; when we
switched out from XFS to ReiserFS our stability problems went away.
It may be the case that the XFS problems have all been corrected in
newer kernels, but I'm not going to put too much effort into trying that
again.
I recently built a postgres with 32KB block sizes and have been doing
some testing. For our particular workloads it has been a win.
-- Alan