# EXT4 vs XFS,ReiserFS

## MaximeG

Hi,

I'm currently using XFS (properly configured) to host my data partition (movies/music) as well as my home partition (games).

And I use ReiserFS for my portage tree.

My questions are :

1) "Is -- for generic purpose to big files handling -- EXT4 faster than XFS ? Has someone tested already, or got a link to an article explaining it ?"

2) "Do you think EXT4 is better than ReiserFS for very small files ?"

Thanks a lot,

Maxime

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## dreadlorde

1. I don't think so.

2. No.

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## Lubomir

I changed from reiserfs to ext4 and its feels faster. Also most benchmarks online shows, that ext4 is often faster then reiserfs.

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## MaximeG

Hi,

Thanks for this.

I think I will keep my XFS partition for my big files,

Turn to EXT4 for everything else then (but /boot)

Regards,

Maxime

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## FizzyWidget

i would advise holding off on ext4 for a few more months, it sounds like it could be a good fs, but there seems to be some issues with it and some programs, although from what i have read it could be down to the program writers and not the fs itself

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## 165177

These issues aren't critical.  They only appear after crashes or hard resets, which shouldn't happen anyway, and starting with kernel 2.9.29, ext4 provides a mount option, which enforces ext3-like behaviour.  Btw, it's indeed the program writer's fault, and interestingly, age-old unix programs like emacs behave correctly.

Still, ext4 support is still rare among popular distributions, including rescue systems like grml or knoppix.  Just in case you've accidentally locked yourself out, it's pretty stupid, if your rescue live disc can't read your root filesystem  :Wink: 

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## low

 *lunar wrote:*   

> Still, ext4 support is still rare among popular distributions, including rescue systems like grml or knoppix.  Just in case you've accidentally locked yourself out, it's pretty stupid, if your rescue live disc can't read your root filesystem 

 

Systemrescuecd supports ext4, in fact I installed gentoo with ext4 from systemrescuecd

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## MaximeG

Hi,

I saw gParted was supporting it also.

Anyways, I need to do some back before moving my stuff, I'll do some tests in the meantime.

Thanks for your answers guys.

Maxime

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## rrbrussell

I am hapily using Ext4 here on everything except /boot and a couple of old data partitions that I haven't yet upgraded.

Ext4 definitely feels faster than xfs on most operations. I think that the difference is due to the new inode and block allocation algorithms. I don't have a direct comparison yet for Ext4 versus xfs. But, the rsync and cache rebuild times for emerge --sync are 25% to 40% faster than compared to Ext3. I use relatime and data=journal as my default mount options.

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## Tin

Hello,

I would like to share my experience about reiserfs and xfs (not yet tried ext4)

In case of hard-reset (quite regular with me because of X locked by graphic drivers) I never loose data with reiserfs but with xfs yes, so be careful with sensitive data you don't want to loose.

I decided to switch from reiserfs to xfs, but now I switched back when I realized some data were lost due to hard-reset.

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## michel7

Are where any benchmarks confirming that ext4 is faster then reiserfs?

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## dylix

 *michel7 wrote:*   

> Are where any benchmarks confirming that ext4 is faster then reiserfs?

 

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_benchmarks&num=1

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## MaximeG

Hi,

ReiserFS (3 at least) is only useful when dealing with very small files, that's where it outperforms other FS'. But it fragments too much to be really useful in a very active partition, that's why I replaced it with XFS for most of my partitions. I don't regret this choice.

But now ext4 is out, I'm studying the possibility to move from XFS to ext4 for my home (very active) partition since ext4 is a generic designed filesystem while XFS is designed for big files.

So the question is : is ext4 better than XFS while dealing with big files ?

If it's a yes, then I consider moving my xfs to ext4 even for my big files partitions.

Regards,

Maxime

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## yngwin

reiser4 > *   :Wink: 

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## DigitalCorpus

I use 3 filesystems:

Ext2 for boot

Reiser4 for /, /usr/portage, and /home

XFS for my document directory for my webserver and for HD TV recording

Problems I've had with Reiser4 are explained here and really affect everyone who's using a modern FS. You can specify mount options to minimize the negative effects of delayed allocation + crashing. I have had wonderfully fast compiling times and noticed a big [negative] difference when I moved my root from cryptcompress to regular reiser4 since portage has some few files in /var/cache/edb/dep.

Even though XFS does use a little bit more CPU power than say Ext3 or JFS, I've had no problems where ultimately it is my HDD that is the bottleneck. It works well for files that are nice and big, i.e. multi-gigabyte and even plays nice with ones all the way down to a couple megs. I've noticed higher latency and the disk trashing so many folks talk about that, but I increases agcount to beyond default (suggested no more than 1 allocation group per GiB by devs) by setting agsize to a multiple of my maximum read speed. I no longer have horrid disk trashing noise, I have not performance hit on throughput, and multiple simultaneous reads/writes were granted less latency and interactivity. I move ~80GiB of data between 2 HDDs a week right now and that is about to go up another ~60GB. I need more storage...

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## rtomek

 *MaximeG wrote:*   

> Hi,
> 
> I saw gParted was supporting it also.
> 
> Anyways, I need to do some back before moving my stuff, I'll do some tests in the meantime.
> ...

 

Not only gparted, but the new version of parted magic supports ext4 as well.  Just used it about 2 weeks ago when I bought a new hard drive and wanted to merge partitions over.  So far, ext4 seems great and I haven't seen any issues or slowdown yet.  Personally, I don't see any reason to use ext3 with a modern kernel, but it has only been a few months of using ext4.

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## MaximeG

Hi,

Never really felt like using reiserfs4 to be honest.

For my needs ReiserFS3 is enough (portage) and I would not trust ReiserFS for a general purpose partition. But that's great we have the choice isn't it ?  :Wink: 

Thanks,

Maxime

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