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Abel Coto
Asked: 2010-12-02 15:02:45 +0800 CST

/ partition as xfs in Centos 5 ? , any advantage for apps using large files?

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I have been investigating a bit previously to install Centos 5 in a box that it will use applications managing large files (i think more than 300 MB minimal).

I was thinking in , as / has a lot of small files, it would be better use ext3 instead xfs , and use only xfs in /home.

But i don't know if use xfs in / could give some increased performance to the applications that will be used there.

As those apps use large files i think perhaps , have / as xfs could benefit those apps when running them.

The data will be in /home,but as the apps would be installed in / , and perhaps as they manage large files , having also / as xfs could be good.

PD: I know that in centos 5 , anaconda doesn't let to format a partition in xfs, but once installed,installing first a new kernel supporting xfs , and installing xfsprogs, i can use a live-cd and with rsync backup / and /home to another disk , format partitions to xfs and then restore backup.

What do you think about using xfs for / in this case?

PD: I know that in centos 5 , anaconda doesn't let to format a partition in xfs, but once installed,installing first a new kernel supporting xfs , and installing xfsprogs, i can use a live-cd and with rsync backup / and /home to another disk , format partitions to xfs and then restore backup.

(if anyone curious how i would do the migrating go here http://pastebin.com/bZPTaunk) (I have done that one time and seems to work)

centos files xfs

1 Answers

  1. From a performance standpoint, xfs usually outperforms ext3 in most (but not quite all) workloads. It definitely performs better when you're dealing with very large files, or with very large quantities of small files (tens of thousands (or more) per directory). However, you won't get much benefit from having / as xfs, and there are a few minor concerns with it.

    First of all, depending on your application, you might be better off creating a separate and dedicated partition for holding the data (as opposed to using /home). Something like /opt, or /opt/data.

    I definitely wouldn't bother with any kind of wipe and restore to get / as xfs. You're just not going to get any return on that work. Having a filesystem formatted as xfs is only going to be of benefit when working with files on that filesystem. The performance of your application, once it's up and running, is going to be completely independent of what filesystem it was loaded from. In short, leave / alone, or you're wasting your time.

    Additionally, in the event of any disk/partition issues, there are a lot more tools and much better support for ext3 than xfs. In a bad scenario like that, you don't want to be jumping through any more hoops than absolutely necessary to get a box back up and running.

    Also, understand that for an average workload, you're only going to see a performance difference of a few percent. There are definitely some (very specific) workloads that will show a significantly bigger performance change, but most won't.

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