Reliability of Journalling Filesystems Under Linux? 66
chrysrobyn asks: "Every write-up I see about journalling file systems under Linux discusses efficiency (embedded) or speed (desktop/server). Have any studies been done on reliability? I've used Linux since Slackware 96 (and kernel 2.0.0), and put it on 9 or 10 machines over the years (Slackware on x86 and Debian on PPC), but I've never strayed from ext2. Always, when the uptime gets high, 20-50 days, the filesystems start to get minor fsck errors. Not that I repair the system and expect it to stay live, I just use the fsck -n to help me decide when a repair is in order. Since the same thing has happened on a variety of hardware (386-PII and every interface in between and 601 and 750 processors with Apple hardware), I'm leaning on blaming the ext2 filesystem for these, the slightest of problems. I typically keep my servers up for as long as possible because 95% of my hardware problems have happened during resets and cold power-ups. It's time for my every-other-year rebuild of my personal server, with another on its way, so I was hoping to incite some anecdotal Slashdot conversation on the journalling file systems available for Linux. Personally, I'm most interested in hearing about the file systems supported under Debian stable for ease of administration for this machine which is a 5 hour drive away from home. I've been around the block a few times, so I'm not fearful of patching the kernel with better patches, but I'm respectful of the work the Debian assurance teams have done."
If you are fscking a live filesystem (Score:4, Informative)
Re:If you are fscking a live filesystem (Score:2)
I suspect that he is sane enough to init S before doing a *REAL* fsck.
Re:If you are fscking a live filesystem (Score:1)
Few links for you (Score:4, Informative)
[bulmalug.net]
This link has some good benchmarks of Ext2, ReiserFS and XFS.
And here is a fairly good news group discussion [google.com] relating to what you are talking about.
Hmmmm... (Score:1)
Yes, I looked at a lot of benchmark studies a few months ago when I was overhauling my systems.
In the end i figured that I would stay with ext2 for the time being.
I'm not simply being reactionary here. Being an old-timer (since late '70s) as a sysadmin and sysprog, I have always placed a high value on good backups carried out rigorously and systematically, e.g. grandfather/father/son in daily, weekly, monthly etc cycles as required by the data turnover, even for desktop boxen.
I've seen all too many people (often very technically savvy) lose important stuff by ignoring backups and trusting journalling systems.
With my setup (on the basis of the benchmarks I read) ext2 outperforms any of the journalling systems, and I'll live with the risk of an occasional fsck on bootup.
/something/ is wrong here. (Score:5, Informative)
You should be aware that if you are running fsck -n on the fs while it is mounted in rw-mode, then it can and will report inconsistencies which are not real, simply because the fs has changed between the passes in fsck, something which it does not expect.
For this reason, I suggest you try again with remounting the fs in ro-mode before running fsck -n. I am fairly sure you will find that your errors go away. Especially since you state this has happened on diverse hardware and presumably diverse kernels.
That said I would recommend going with a journaling fs for that extra safety that comes from never getting inconsistent even if the power goes out at the worst moment. ext3 and reiserfs are both good, my preference would be ext3 for the simple reason that it can be mounted as an ext2-fs, which means that you will be able to read it with any old rescue-disk or whatever. Reiserfs typically requires you to redo all your rescue-disks, and make sure that your backup-restore-scheme handles it rigth.
If the remounting in ro-mode does *not* make the reported errors in fsck -n go away, and you are somehow able to reproduce this, please report the bug to linux-kernel.
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:5, Informative)
On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
Crashes in Linux are NOT a regular thing, unless you want to be extremly bleeding edge and/or use NVidia's drivers and/or ALSA (at least up to 0.90rc5) on 2.4 with lowlatency- and preemptive-patches. Especially if the above stuff are used on SMP-systems.
My system used to crash (freeze) frequently (every 2nd or 3rd day).. But after I sold my GeForce4-card and got a Matrox G450 instead, and switched back to using OSS instead of ALSA (I've got a SB Live..), I've not had a single crash! It has been running for several months without a single reboot, and everything is super-stable! I've used it heavily every day, burnt more than 150 CD-Rs, been on Direct Connect and Freenet 24/7 etc.. That's despite I run the heavily patched 2.4.19-gentoo-r8 kernel, and my whole system (including the kernel) is compiled with gcc 3.2 "-march=athlon-mp -O3 -mfpmath=sse -pipe"..
So my conclusion is: Linux IS stable! Extremly stable! The cause of 99% of the "linux crashes!"-bullshit is because of NVidia's crap-drivers (fast but unstable) and drivers still not "preemtive"-safe (ALSA on SMP for example).. But those things are not used on servers anyway.
And about the "hardware problems": Yes, you DO get hardware problems MUCH MUCH more often on cheap PCs than on multi-million-dollar Unix-servers from Sun/HP/IBM.. Cheap PCs uses the cheapest-of-the-cheapest variant of all components to cut down the price. Expensive Unix-servers use expensive components and have a lot of redundancy, so you don't have to have downtime just because a CPU, a harddisk som RAM or something else failed.
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:2)
I agree. The only time I've hung my systems
I can't speak for ALSA drives being bad -- when I used them they seemed to be fine -- but Nvidia's do cause regular hangs for me on an AMD Athlon system (Chipset: "VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI]"). Even adding mem=nopentium to the boot line and using Nvdia's latest drivers this system hangs on a regular basis.
The type of instability I get with Nvidia's drivers reminds me of the odd crashes I used to get when I used Windows. For what it's worth.
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:1)
Don't you think you're projecting your anecdotal experience just a little much?
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:2)
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:2)
Wierd, I use the preempt, low latency, and ALSA 0.9.0rc[forgot, I think four] on my 2.4.19 kernel. My uptime is now 87 days, that doesn't seem unstable at all.
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:2)
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:1)
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:2, Interesting)
IBM's Mainframe line of computers kicks WinDOS ass. You can run binaries compiled on slow, clunky 1960's System-360 refrigerators on modern multiprocessing, fault-tolerant, redundant zSeries systems. I can't even run my favorite DOS 5.0 apps under DOS 6.0, least of all under Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. My PC, when it was a DOS machine, had DOS 3.0, DOS 5.0, DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. Lots of rebooting to use all my old apps, unless I wanted mysterious crashes and freezes.
Linux can still run QMAGIC executables compiled against BSD libc4 on a modern ELF/glibc2.3 system by turning on a kernel option and copying a few
My only complaint about Linux compatibility, actually, is just the idiots careless programmers who change the API of their library without changing the major revision number. (*cough QT cough*)
Re:There's more (thanks for crediting me) (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure you're supposed to work in "charnel house" somewhere, so points off for that.
Oh wait, that's the other troll. Sorry, I got you guys confused for a minute :)
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:3, Informative)
I just finished evaluating JFS 1.0.24 for Linux. My opinion of 1.0.24 and JFS is IBM is doing the port as a courtesy to AIX and OS/2 migrators. It is extremely robust, but slow, 2x slower than XFS or Reiser. I had maximal R/W activity (tar untar create deletes in while loops, Xwin started, downloading via ftp, scp, etc) and power off hot several times, never saw anything but "file system clean."
I am in process or evaluating XFS 1.2pre3. 1.1 XFS for Linux is unreal. It does "everything," it has done it for years, its high performance, has a robust heritage and is all around very good. I have cold killed it, inserted and removed hot swap drives while running, while doing fairly absurd amounts of activity on the test box. Not using this file system is a shame. The release patched kernels, one catering to the Redhat droids and the other is a vanilla with their magic patched in. This isn't a Marcelo kludge either, these are professionals who care greatly in the stability of their product and do a great job in their little cornel of the kernel. The Mandrake and SuSE kernels have this stuff patched in, along with extended attributes and ACLs, and the XFS kernel only has ACL and DMAPI support, and the JFS patches won't apply clean to their kernel, but on thing is true of SGI's version: It actually compiles. The Mandrake 9 and SuSE 8.1 kernels seem not able to compile outside of their proprietary environments. I am upset about this. Typical second tier vendors who fail to bring coherency to fragmented set of projects loosely and informally known as the nebulous "Linux."
EXT3 is a dirty hack (EXT2 with fake journaling). I don't know how EXT3 gets high performance marks - ever - my experience has suggest awful and inconsistent performance with several nasty changes made to e2fsprogs in succession to address potentially severe problems. Its insulting to enterprise customers that RedHat touts this garbage as a journaling filesystem. Reiser is a UFO, and is easily corruptible, and I fail to understand its wide use and early integration in the kernel - my only guess is its simplicity required the least cleaning up of the kludged Linux file system underpinnings. I also get sick to death of Hans blaming everyone and their mother while the guys at XFS and JFS quietly patch away the problems, while Hans whines. Hans did have a good point about the broken RedHat compiler back when it was an issue. I base my opinion of EXTx, and Reiser based on experience. I am appalled, and disappointed at the lack of respect the Linux kernel maintainers have given to XFS. The best of the litter being the last to go in - typical, and Appalling.
UFS+logging on Solaris and UFS+S on FreeBSD are both superior. I have never seen these go haywire. Ever. Interestingly, UFS+S is apparently the 'softcore' journaling method that EXT3 uses, but its far less damageable by empirical determination, and its clearly faster and runs more smoothly. Anytime Veritas appears, which ironically is included in SCO, and is available for Solaris and NT based OSs, things come along quite nicely.
Recently OS X added journaling to the already pathetic HFS+ filesystem. My experience with Mac OS 10.X, including 10.2 has been horrible. I think its inferior, the Mach kernel was deprecated by its progenitors, CMU, in 1994. I think the FreeBSD userland is outdated. I think HFS+ is a pathetic file system and fail to understand why they don't use UFS, but if you have ever tried using it with OS X you know it's not "finished." [defined as: nothing work if UFS is used - don't try and say otherwise] Adding journaling to HFS+ will only slow down an already horrifically bloated and underpowered platform. I find it laughable Apple hardware does not get submitted to www.spec.org, but I have CPU2000 results for PPC 1.25GHz, and of course it is so horrible they can't submit - everything including the SPARC beats it hands down. I also though having to have OS 9 installed on a separate partition as OS X for classic to work properly laughable. I base my deprecation of the Apple efforts on real life experience and objective comparison. I only have to convince myself, but for those who can't easily see where the truth lies on the speed of a Max vs. a PC, my condolences to any significant other you might be lucky to have.
FreeBSD 5. UFS2 will probably be one of the best filesystems to ever see the light of day, and vinum will be there as well.
[I hate Eugenia Dork Loli and her horrible crap "editing" and "journalism," but there are interviews with Steve Best [JFS],Hans Reiser, and Nathan Scott [XFS], held prisoner on OS"News" (more like OSCrapConjecture), very informative; http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=69 [osnews.com] ; with some more Journaling info here, http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue55/florido.html [linuxgazette.com] showing how Robust XFS is]
When examining the facts, the superiority of XFS becomes clear, and I advocate its use, it's the responsible thing to do. I have recently beaten heavily on a 2.4.19 stock + XFS pre3 of release 1.2 merged in. I can tell you my experience with the Dell 1650 and constant filesystem abuse that the filesystem is that last thing I would worry about in that kernel. I am eagerly awaiting the release of the 2.4.20 kernel, typically long over due as we seem to have an absentee maintainer that rarely speaks, however, upon its release I believe the XFS 1.2 stable will be merged in or completed and I will have a configuration good to go for use on the order of years.
While I may have harsh words from certain practices and sometimes people, I find XFS and the 2.4.19 kernel to be acceptably stable. I ran that 1650 through the washing machine fairly rigorously, and besides the idiotic spurious " Warning - running *really* short on DMA buffers" errors (which caused a flame war on LKML), it seems to be a useful kernel. The RedHat 2.4.18-17.7x kernel, by the way, is the worst most untested pile I have ever seen. What is wrong with these people? Several net drives with no working promiscuous mode, kernel panics, the list is endless.
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:1)
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:2)
I was faced with a difficult decision, however, since I didn't particularly have anywhere to STORE all my data to convert to ReiserFS, (at the time) fairly new XFS, JFS, etc. So I made the logical (for me) choice of going with ext3. The best part? Sitting in LAX waiting for a flight, converting my FS to ext3 (I'd compiled the kernel the night before, during my < 36 hours "home time").
Since then, I've had the system board in the machine spontaneously fry itself while the machine was sitting on a desk not being touched, but updating Debian in the background, I've had various other lockups (usually some combination of ALSA and resuming from a suspend), etc, and not once have I lost any data, or had FS corruption, nor have I experienced anything that could be attributed as "slowness".
I can see the merits of XFS, especially since I have friends who are familiar with the Irix version, but, if you've got a running system that absolutely can't take another drive in it to migrate data to, or happen to be somewhere you can't get temp storage, EXT3 is a logical way to go.
It might not be the BEST solution, or the solution for everyone, but so far for me, it's been a damned good one.
(Incidentally, I lucked out w/ that fried system board, since I was on-site at a customer with other coworkers, and was able to verify immediately, via swapping drives, that all my data was intact. Yay.)
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:3, Informative)
I think I may be able to point to the answer.
You should be aware that if you are running fsck -n on the fs while it is mounted in rw-mode, then it can and will report inconsistencies which are not real, simply because the fs has changed between the passes in fsck, something which it does not expect.
I'm doing my fsck -n's in RW mode. From the less file system experienced Linux user's perspective, I wonder what ext2 does when going from RW to RO that cleans up for fsck. I can understand the value of delaying some writes, but shouldn't that get flushed when the box is not active? Would fsck -n work on a RW mounted ReiserFS, JFS, XFS or ext3?
I'm not being argumentative, this sounds like one of those typical Unix behaviors, but learning why may help me with other potential issues.
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:2)
Remounting RO "cleans up" for fsck, by flushing all pending writes to disk, and insuring that no new writes happen during fsck's run. Even on an 'idle' system, writes to the file system can and do occur (to update meta-data, if nothing else). If you REALLY want to run fsck on a RW file-system, you should at least use the "noatime" mount flag, and possibly "sync", and "dirsync" as well.
You can also use LVM, and create "snapshots" of the live filesystem, which can then be checked for consistency offline, while the original filesystem chugs along.
I agree that it is highly unlikely that the fsck errors you see are anything more than anomalies caused by your method of checking (unless you have some funky power source or radiation that is affecting a variety of systems). ext2 is considered to be quite stable (ie. wont become inconsistent over time on working hardware). Are these SCSI disks or IDE? I'd suspect the disk driver code before the filesystem code.
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:2)
Well, the reason whz zou get inconsistencies when doing fsck -n in rw mode is actually quite simple. Remember that fsck checks that the filesystem is consistent, this means for example: reference-counts are correct, directories all have a ".." and an "." entry, no block is both marked as being part of a file, and on the list of free blocks and so on.
Many fs-operations are not atomic. For example, to remove a directory the kernel will first remove everything it contains (including "." and "..") and then remove the directory itself. Now, what happens if fsck happens to touch the directory *between* those two steps ? That is, after "." and ".." have been removed, but before the dir itself is gone ? You'll get an inconsistency.
This is just one silly example, it's easy to think of others. You are rigth that the problems should be smaller if the filesystem has been inactive for a while so that most fs-operations are finished, but a total guarantee that everything is finished you don't get. Possibly running "sync" would be enough though, you migth try that.
remounting in ro-mode helps because it ensures that all write-operation fully completes, and also stops the kernel from making any changes to the fs in the middle of your fsck-run.
Re: /something/ is wrong here. (Score:1)
> ext2 is a quite stable fs
Agreed. My typical login time is 180 days, and I almost always have > 100 processes alive on the system for that whole time, but the only time I've had disk problems in several years of operating that way is when I had hardware failures.
Re:/something/ is wrong here. (Score:2)
agree I put reiserfs on a 'puter for my wife's use, she was a total computer newbe for safety. she'd some times just punch the power button out of frustration but never a problem with the file system. I couldn't detect any seat-of-the-pants difference in speed.
ReiserFS (Score:2)
I've user ReiserFS since it first appeared in Mandrakes distro. I have never had any problems what so ever with it. It just keeps running.
old hardware (Score:2, Informative)
For the last series, I have not noticed any unexpected filesystem errors after 200-300 days of uptime (they need to be rebooted from time to time for kernel upgrades).
To conclude, always suspect your hardware first, especially if it's at least a couple years old.
Reseating eliminates contact cruft. (Score:2)
This is correct. Actually, however, suspect that your hardware has developed a bad connection first. Many problems are corrected by pulling every adapter and cable out about 1 millimeter, then pushing it in again. That wipes the contacts clean of oxide.
Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:5, Informative)
My experience so far is that Ext3 is more reliable (read: repairable) than ReiserFS simply due to the fact that Ext3 is a kind of "extension" to Ext2, so you can just run the good old well tested and known to work fsck.ext2 on a Ext3 partition should it screw up.
But I have yet to see a Ext3 partition screwing up, I've set up several PCs and servers with Ext3 and it works fine, no single problem to date.
Unlinke ReiserFS. I have to admit, my only experiences with ReiserFS were about one and a half years ago or so, but at that time I had set up a home PC with ReiserFS and somehow I f***ed it up beyond all repair. I don't remember what I did then but I just got scared of ReiserFS
On the other hand I have still another home PC, running SuSE Linux 7.2 updated to 7.3 with ReiserFS which just runs fine, and this is my home server, running 24-7.
So I guess until you don't do anything stupid like I did both ReiserFS and Ext3 are pretty reliable today, given their widespread use you would probably have heard of any major glitches/problems
Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:5, Informative)
XFS is a very mature file system, and file systems that are many TB work fine with its defaults. Performs more consistantly too. EXT2/3 was very sensitive to RAID stripe size, and things like that. Even setting the special stride option, you had to recreate the filesystem many times to make sure things worked right. XFS performed consistantly at any stripe size, with no strange dips in performance if boundaries didn't line up just right.
In all, if you are building a large RAID, I would go with XFS. For day-to-day use of 200GB or less on a single disk, EXT2/3 is fine. (You probably still don't want to let it waste 5% of the disk, that is such a retarded default, use -m 1 to help reduce it)
Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:2)
Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:3, Insightful)
Quoting from the Gentoo x86 install guide:
I would not recommend XFS until some major work has been done.
Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:1)
Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:2)
fucking up your filesystem is easy, and you generally have yourself to blame (in my experience).
Re:Ext3 vs ReiserFS (Score:3, Interesting)
Jason
High uptime? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not high uptime! Maybe if you're running Windows 95. I've had my system running for a little over 320 days now, and I haven't experienced any problems on any of my ext3 drives. And I've never before experienced any problems, on ext3/2 HDs. If you want reliability, I think the best thing you can do is buy a UPS. That makes it much more reliable than any FS change can do.
Re:High uptime? (Score:1, Funny)
When you say "320 days", do you mean "320 days since the last reboot", or "320 days since the last crash, ignoring normal maintenance restarts (e.g. for security patches)"? If the former, what is the host's IP address? I need another zombie for my DDoS network.
(For the sarcasm impaired, I'm just kidding about that DDoS thing. My zombie network has nothing to do with denial of service attacks. Instead, I will use it to take over the world! Mwhahahahaha! Phear my elite haxor skillz, luddite-mortals!)
Re:High uptime? (Score:2)
Reiserfs keeps saving my ass (Score:1)
No problems with Reiser (Score:5, Informative)
We had a bad network adapter which would fail when other DMA devices were busy. This meant that whenever disk I/O was heavy, using the network adapter was likely to cause a complete system lockup. This took a while to diagnose as the problems took upward of two weeks to reproduce.
Despite the equivalent of having the power cable yanked randomly a dozen times when the machine was at its busiest, we never had a single problem with Reiser. The file which was being written to existed as the old version, and there wasn't even a lengthy fsck. Integrity was 100%.
Re:No problems with Reiser (Score:1)
What kind of NIC was it?
How did you diagnose? Just start some massive dd's and ftp's?
I was getting ready to buy a new motherboard, because I thought the IDE chipset was going bad (had a power supply overheat, so it's possible but unlikely.) The NIC is much more likely.
Any info is appreciated!
Re:No problems with Reiser (Score:2)
The RealTek DMA system is a joke. Tiny failures aren't tolerated, nor do the two popular drivers handle buffer overfills -- a bad network cable is enough to destabilize a system.
Still, it was a hard lock, no screen blanking. (Or are you sure it hasn't locked up while the console screen blanker was active?)
Grabbing a DEC Tulip-based card will increase performance and stability both, and you can get one for $5-15 if you have a decent shop near you.
Re:No problems with Reiser (Score:1)
Most of the lockups are while the blanker is active (the machine sits in a closet.) The one time I saw it lockup, it hung leaving the boot up fsck progess indicator on the screen. No errors were displayed.
The machine has 2 different 3Com cards. But as I think back, I did see the machine lock up with both cards out. That leaves the Video card, motherboard, RAM or CPU. Guess I swap out the RAM, since that's cheap-n-easy.
Do not trust your fs (Score:5, Insightful)
Two cents from an old admin.
Do not trust your backup... (Score:5, Insightful)
Test your backup. Not just once, but periodically.
Two cents from a (different) old admin.
Re:Do not trust your backup... (Score:2)
Two cents from (another) old admin.
Re:Do not trust your backup... (Score:1)
My advice, keep all the tapes burried under your house. It's still safer than Iron Mountain.
If ext2 is flaky, journaling will be worse (Score:2)
This indicates, to me, some hardware flakiness on your end. (Even though you say this happens on a wide variety of hardware.) In every account I've seen, journaling filesystems are more stressful on the hardware because - surprise! - the journal is constantly being written to. I'd stick to ext2 if I were you, and figure out why you get any errors when you fsck a dismounted file system.
I'm in charge of roughly forty Linux boxes, including many desktops and many servers. I've never seen any problems that I could blame on the filesystem. (Though there have been kernel releases in the past - including one in the 2.4.x series, IIRC - where there was a bad filesystem bug, fixed within a day.)
EXT3 (Score:2)
ext3 on woody (Score:1, Informative)
Been paranoid, but its okay so far (Score:1)
I have been paranoid about moving away from ext2 in production environment myself, so I have been trying out ext3 and reiserfs on personal boxes for the last eigth months. No real problem so far (once I still had a fs error on reiserfs after replaying the log, a fsck fixed that). These are no hard hit or database servers, but I tend to copy a lot of files and data (several gigs) simultaneously between reiserfs file systems and mix up my cd-rom eject button with the reset button from time to time, and on the ext3 box I tried hacking some usb driver which made it crash every ten minutes over three weeks...
Being concerned for reliability, you might look into the ext3 options to have ordered writes etc., or otherwise your meta data might be fine, although your actual file data might get screwed... The kernel mailing list should hold hints on stability (the more absent complaints are, the more stable it is ;), and as said before, in the end you have your backups... Don't you?
I still wonder about meta journaling on database servers with huge data files, and the next thing I am paranoid about is using LVM on Linux :)
ext3 gets my vote (Score:2)
I've only tried reiserfs and xfs for a few days each, for the most part I've stuck to ext3 in recent days. I've hard-crashed (pull the plug type of thing) several different machines with ext3 while filesystem write activity was going on and never had a problem. Based on my time with ext3, my limited experience with reiserfs/xfs, and reading lots of lkml, I think ext3 is the safest choice at this point in time, even if it's not neccesarily the best performance.
ext3 is simple to install or uninstall. I promise. (Score:3, Informative)
You obviously haven't looked very closely into ext3, because it's an extremely simple layer on top of a standard ext2 filesystem. Essentially, all it is, is an extra file in
the FAQ [sapienti-sat.org] has one question that lists the two steps required to install a journal on a stock ext2 filesystem (provided you've got a 2.4.16+ kernel, or have patched your older kernel).
Not only is it very simple to install, but it's very simple to uninstall too. Blindingly easy, in fact. Mount your filesystem as ext2. Done. No journal. If you want to do it permanently, there's an answer about that in the FAQ too.
So really, you have nothing to lose by trying ext3. I've had 0 problems with it, and I use it on a laptop that gets a lot of abuse WRT being turned off at random times (I can't view my battery level in Linux, but I can in Windows. Thanks broken ACPI BIOS...)
The only downside is that the filesystem will sync every 5 seconds or so, which completely destroys any possibility of ever letting the disks spin down for power saving, but that's more of a laptop issue than a server issue.
Re:ext3 is simple to install or uninstall. I promi (Score:1)
If you mount it with the noatime option, then it won't constantly rewrite the last access time for files; this means that your disks can spin down again. It's worked for me.
Reiser works for me (Score:2)
That's about as annecdotal as it gets!
Anyway, I'm not going to recomend reiser over the others since I don't have any experience with them, but I will say that I've developed great confidence in reiser's reliability. If I had any old data that I really cared about and wanted to use the same drive, though, I would probably go with Ext3 for the non-destructive (or so I've heard) upgrade.
My (abnormal) experience with ext3 (Score:1)
I know this is not common, but I had a bad experience with ext3 a few months back that resulted in the first ever time I have had a complete catastrophic data loss without hardware failure.
I'll start with the observed events (the stuff I know that happened):
The following is my hypothesis as to what was happening at the low level to cause this series of problems. (Note, however, that my knowledge of the ext3 internals is sketchy, so the following is probably somewhere between slightly mistaken and out to pasture in left field.)
Note that I cannot confirm that steps 2 and 3 took place in that order. My guess is that if the journal damage was bad enough, step 2 would not even be necessary (though it was clearly happening). I can only assume that the progressive nature of the failure resulted from data from journal replays between each step #2
My guess is that some buggy/un-updated version of some piece of software was likely to blame. (I was quite a bit behind on my updates.) However, my hypothesis leads me to believe that storing the journal as a file on the journaled filesystem itself is a bad design decision that probably contributed to the extent of data loss on my system.
Journalling Filesystems Under Linux (Score:1)
I've been using farious Linux FS on multiple production servers, ext2/reiserfs, no problems at all. Today, I'm using ext3, quota support is better and you still can use chattr with ext3;)
Anyway, you should run RAID1 or 5, if possible with a hw RAID controller, hotswapable disks and perform regular backups, if you are serious about your data.
If anyone has some info, why ext3 is in most benchmarks faster then ext2, I would like to hear.