On Monday 20 December 2004 06:41, Jim Miller wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I have recently been burned by the XFS file system -- After a recent > system crash/hang we experienced a lot of file corruption and needed to > restore from a backup that was ~12hrs old. It seems that XFS keeps a > lot of journal info in memory and a sudden system crash (hang) prevents > it from writing out the journal. > > We run a few game servers that have a large number of large and small > files that are actively accessed (and restoring from a backup 12hrs old > made a lot of our gamers very unhappy). We were running EXT3 (which in > the past recovered nicely from hangs/crashes) but performance was so bad > we needed a new FS so 6mos ago a decision was made to go with XFS. > I would like to switch to ReiserFS (v3) (I understand Reiser4 isn't > quite ready for production use) and was hoping to get the warm fuzzies > about making this decision. I know it's much faster than ext3 but at > this point I need to feel good about it's ability to recover from a > sudden system hang/crash/reset. > > > Thanks, > Jim
My experience of Reiserfs recovery is good. I had once a HW RAID5 array with a defective controller unable to detect harddisk errors. Though two of the five disks failed I was able to recover around 80% of the mail folders. However, there were cases on this list where reiserfsck had problems and namesys needed a metadata dump to fix reiserfsck. I guess most problems it had are fixed now. Note: always use the newest reiserfsck version from namesys :-) If you need good performance and data integrity I'd go with the following mount options for drives at controllers 1) with battery backup: rw,noatime,nodiratime,notail 2) without battery backup: rw,noatime,nodiratime,notail,barrier=flush and a 2.6.9 kernel. The barrier mount option should provide protection against a corrupted journal during power failure for drives with write caching enabled. (Mostly IDE) -- lg, Chris
