On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 05:34:14AM -0600, Moshe Yudkowsky wrote:

Carlos Carvalho wrote:

quoted

I use reiser3 and xfs. reiser3 is very good with many small files. A
simple test shows interactively perceptible results: removing large
files is faster with xfs, removing large directories (ex. the kernel
tree) is faster with reiser3.

My current main concern about XFS and reiser3 is writebacks. The default  
mode for ext3 is "journal," which in case of power failure is more  
robust than the writeback modes of XFS, reiser3, or JFS -- or so I'm  
given to understand.

On the other hand, I have a UPS and it should shut down gracefully  
regardless if there's a power failure. I wonder if I'm being too 
cautious?

I'm not sure what your actual worry is. It's not like XFS loses
*commited* data on power failure. It may lose data that was never
required to go to disk via fsync()/fdatasync()/sync. If someone is
losing data on power failure is the unprotected write cache of the
harddrive.

If you have properly-behaved applications, then they know when to do an
fsync and if XFS returns success on fsync and your linux is properly
configured (no write-back caches on drives that are not backed by NVRAM,
etc.) then you won't lose data.

regards,
iustin