Re: Which hardware/filesystem for postgresql?

Cris Carampa <cris119@operamail.com> writes:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
>
>> The best performance results I have seen on Linux systems have
>> involved the use of JFS.  I found XFS to be a little slower, and it
>> has the distinct demerit that it is not in the 'official' kernel tree
>> yet, thereby meaning that you have to get into the pain of managing
>> heavily-patched kernels.  The "kernel management" issue strikes me as
>> being a much bigger deal than the relatively minor performance
>> difference.
>
> Thank you for your answer (it's still me, now I'm using my "official"
> usenet account :))

You may see my response from a different account, too...  :-)

> Kernel management is not an issue for me because recent SuSE 2.4.x
> kernels already include XFS support by default.
> What worries me is stability and tolerance to power failures and other
> "bad treatments". I have EXT2 here and I'm happy with it but since the
> servers would be located in client shops I wish to have something that
> doesn't need "human" input in such cases. Have you experienced (or
> heard) horror stories about XFS, expecially related to postgresql? Do
> you think JFS is better than XFS in this field too?
>
> Thanks again. Kind regards,

I _would_ recommend having a journalling filesystem as opposed to
ext2, from the perspective of atrocious fsck times, but I don't have a
metric that I am particularly confident in by which to evaluate JFS as
"better" than XFS, or vice-versa, from a "stability" perspective.

Neither has been available for long enough for there to be a large
body of results to report on.

I used to follow ReiserFS development (I was one of the "early
adoptors;" I have had filesystems on that FS since about 1998), and
heard [though did not personally experience] horror stories.  I
recently had some minor data loss due to problems with ReiserFS, and
would definitely NOT recommend it for a PostgreSQL partition, as its
strengths don't fit with what PostgreSQL does.  But I haven't been
following JFS/XFS mailing lists to hear horror stories.
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Christopher Browne
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