Experiences with ext3?

[Duckula]

I've just converted my home machine's ext2 partitions to ext3. It's quite easy once the kernel support is on: tune2fs -j and edit /etc/fstab.

I've felt it a bit slow. P3 800, Seagate 40G at ata100. It may be just my imagination, though.

For other people who have attempted it: what has been their long term experience? Is it worth to keep the filesystem this way, or is better to revert it to ext2?

[daisho]

I use ext3 for all my servers now. The journaling capabilites I find make reliablility much higher. Not to mension if I have an unclean restart (though it really doesn't happen with linux) the server is backup much quicker.

daisho.

[Nick_W]

I've had nightmares with unclean restarts but I suspect that may be nothing to do with ext3.

Slow - YES, not hugely, and it could be my imagination also as I've not tested but, it certainly seems slower...

The one crash I had (not crash, unexpected power cut) was a pretty smooth recovery though....

Nick

[Oaf357]

I've been doing some extensive research on Linux filesystems lately and have found that the data=writeback option is the quickest though least protective journalling option. The default data=ordered option is the default.

You probably already know this but I have a question for you.

Why did you choose ext3?

[daisho]

journaling.

[Oaf357]

Why not XFS or ReiserFS to name two?

[Duckula]

Why did you choose ext3?

Quicker startup time; even when I have not crashes often, frequent boots prompt for filesystem checks. I'm not going to disable them. And, as I already mentioned, my whole disk is 40G: they were becoming a bit unconfortable.

Why not XFS or ReiserFS

It took me less than five minutes :)

[Oaf357]

Good reasoning.

[martin]

I also use ext3 but that always seemed like the normal thing to do, I haven't considered anything else. Anybody have experience with other filesystems and could give us a summary of differences/advantages?

[chaitan]

moving from ext2 to ext3 was one of my best decision.
slow? no, I can't feel it and "hdparm -tT" won't show it to me.
well, ext3 probably may not be the best performance fs, but it's stable, and it's the easiest way converting from ext2 to journaling fs.

The article about several filesystems is very helpful:
[www-106.ibm.com...]

[Duckula]

Well, of course "hdparm -tT" won't show anything; it measures the raw disk throughput ignoring filesystems :)

I've actually stayed with it. The extra load has shown on the daily updatedb thing, but it's not too bad, and on daily using and, I think, even compiling (just built kde 3.1.2) it's not too much.

[dingman]

Dukula, you jinxed me. When this thread started, I'd been running ext3 for quite some time on my poor old server, and never had occasion to find out whether it actually improved recovery time when the system wasn't shut down right. Now I do.

On the bright side, it works quite well. Power dies, UPS turns out to be dead, server dies, power comes back, server comes back. Re-playing the journal and checking the file system took practically no time, and there were no errors. :)

/dingman wanders off to see how long APC's warantee coverage lasts