# Shocking ReiserFS 4 Beta Performance on Mammoth Files

## yottabit

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but ReiserFS 4 Beta's performance on mammoth files (say, 512 MB to 2 GB) is shocking compared to ReiserFS 3.6 ... in a bad way.

Now keep in mind that obviously ReiserFS was designed to be a database replacement directly on the filesystem, able to handle small file accesses with a breeze. I've used ReiserFS for quite a long time now on my production servers and have always been happy with its performance, reliability, and extra storage space available due to ultra-efficient storage of those small files so common on Gentoo systems.  :Smile: 

Okay, so I know ReiserFS was never meant to handle the mammoth files I've been throwing at it, but I was shocked at the performance difference between 3.6 and 4. These graphs show it all...

Anyway, so far XFS is the leading contender to replace my giant file array, and I'll keep ReiserFS 3.6 on my main array.

And I'm currently benchmarking ext2, ext3, Reiser3.6, Reiser4, JFS, XFS, and VFAT  :Twisted Evil:  on various stripe-sized arrays. This detailed report will be available likely in a week or two.

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## R!tman

Thank you very much. Maybe you can also use different chunk sizes und block sizes  :Smile: .

I am especially looking forward to that, because I habe just created a raid 5 with a very frustrating performance.

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## yottabit

Unfortunately, at the current time, Reiser4 only support 4 KB blocksize. But yes, I will be showing different stripe/chunk sizes in my tests.

With preliminary results I can safely say that if you're a regular user, ReiserFS 3.6 is a great choice. If you need to store huge files (512 MB or greater) I'd suggest XFS or JFS (ext2/3 isn't too bad either).

I've also had some issues with Reiser4 causing kernel panic under this stressed load, and also refusing to unmount.  :Smile:  It's Beta... so don't judge until it's Final I guess.

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## R!tman

Oh, I almost forgot the link you posted. This looks really strange. 

Reiser4 is not THAT slow. I have it installed on my x86 machine. It performs quite well, at least not worse that reiserfs. 

I am even considering using it on my new amd64 machine, the one with the slow raid5.

[edit]

Here is the link to the "slow raid problem":https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-306345-highlight-.html

[/edit]

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## yottabit

Keep in the filesizes being shown in the graphs.

For my purposes I'm testing against mammoth files. For normal and small files I'm sure Reiser4 would be an improvement over Reiser3.6, otherwise what would be the point?

The whole point in my creating that graph is because I've been using Reiser3.6 for a long time because the benefits of the super efficient handling of small and normal files far outweighed the slight less performance of the handling of mammoth files (compared to XFS & JFS at least). However, by the looks of Reiser4, if I want to stay with the "latest" Reiser4 I'll have to segregate my mammoth files to a separate filesystem.

That's all.

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## R!tman

 *yottabit wrote:*   

> However, by the looks of Reiser4, if I want to stay with the "latest" Reiser4 I'll have to segregate my mammoth files to a separate filesystem.

 

With these stats, of course  :Smile: . I just didn't think it was that bad. 

But, as you already said: It's beta!

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