ext4

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Doug Hunley <doug at hunley.homeip.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 15:24, Michael Hipp <Michael at hipp.com> wrote:
>> Not really looking for anything specific. I just saw a blurb that it is much
>> better than ext3 and ready for primetime. But I thought it wasn't quite that
>> far along.
>
> I've been using it for a while now. If you take advantage of the new
> features (which changes the filesystem layout, see my other email)
> then it is faster than ext3 and is better at space alllocation (I "got
> back" about 2% of my 1Tb raid after converting everything to extents).
> Ext4 is also better about not causing fragmentation, if you care about
> that kinda thing (online defrag is coming soon, btw).
>
> In all honesty, if you're happy w/ what you have and aren't jonesing
> for ext4, I'd wait until btrfs becomes stable and then convert to it.
> It's gonna rock

That's what people have been saying about the 'next big thing' for
many years.  ext4 was supposed to be the savior.  ext3 was supposed to
be the savior.  Ditto for jfs, ReiserFS and XFS.  I'm sure that once
btrfs comes out, there will be some new hotness on the horizon that
will supposedly supersede it.

To be blunt, I've yet to see any new features in ext4 that XFS didn't
have years ago.  If people like extX, that's great.  Personally, I've
had no good experiences with it (and I acknowledge that others have
said the same about XFS).  The times when I've been forced to use it,
I've had occasional data loss, plus the laughable fsck time sinks.
I've never lost any data to XFS, and as I mentioned a few days ago,
I've got several TB on it, in production environments.

In my opinion, asking people for their opinion of a filesystem is a
bit silly, especially if you don't fully detail how you intend to use
it and get the same data from those who respond.  Using it on a few
hundred GB on your home desktop is a vastly different usage scenario
than putting it on a high volume 500TB NFS server.  Unless the
filesystem is complete garbage, its going to be fine for some
environments, and crappy in others.  So if you get 10 people saying
that ext4 is great, and they're all using it in a fashion that differs
from your needs, then their feedback is effectively useless.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org