Mark Knecht schrieb: > Hi, > I'm wondering if anyone has opinions (on this list? Right...) as to > the best file system type for running vmware images of Windows XP. As > best I can tell an 8GB C: drive shows up as 4x 2GB files and 1.5GB > DRAM is modeled in a file of its own: > [...]I suspect XFS, Reiser or > something other than ext3 that I'm currently using would possibly make > a difference? > > But would it be a big difference? How would I test it? I.e. - not > that XFS is or isn't a good file system but that it actually helps > with vmware operation? > > My current system is AMD64, 4GB DRAM, i5 Core which is 4 processor > threads. Target machine is AMD64, i7 Core or possibly dual XEON, 16GB, > 4-6 monitors and multiple 1TB+ drives in some sort of RAID mainly for > speed, and then additionally an external RAID for backup. >
As an educated guess, I would say that ext4's usage of extents should improve the performance on large files by a measurable margin. As one of the last filesystem drivers which still use the Big Kernel Lock, I would also guess that Reiserfs might not scale well to heavily multithreaded usage or multicore CPUs. However, I cannot say if this has any kind of noticable effect on 4-8 core machines. As Roberto Waltman already suggested, benchmarking is the way to go. By the way, as you mention RAID. Note that on pure read operations, a RAID1 can be as good or even better than a RAID0 because read operations can be distributed freely among the disks since all of them contain all data. Hope this helps Florian Philipp
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