XFS: Recent and Future Adventures in Filesystem Scalability - Dave Chinner

Filesystems are being asked to scale to larger configurations every week. They need to store more files, larger amounts of data and be able to index that data more efficiently than ever. XFS has had a number of pain points for managing large numbers of files and complex metadata structures that limit it's ability to scale out to the capabilities of it's underlying structures.

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  Science & Technology

[ToBeFreiwuppertal]

why do I still use ext4?^^

I should really try XFS, thanks! :D

[ToBeFreiwuppertal]

If you're able to "guarantee" that, I assume you hadn't. Maybe you have learned to have good backups independent of the file system now.

[Arai503]

After researching ZFS, Dave's responses to the Q&A session really illustrate the difference in scope and philosophy between file system engineers and data storage engineers. And I have nothing against moving to another POSIX compliant platform to reap the benefits.

[Steve Bergman]

I'm trying to get excited about btrfs. But it's dog-slow. And doesn't really have much in the way of features that Ext3/4 + LVM2 does not already offer. It does, however, have snapshots at nearly zero cost. Then again, Solaris & FreeBSD have had a more featureful and better tested filesystem available for years. But after weighing everything, I always seem to end up choosing Linux and Ext3/4.

[ToBeFreiwuppertal]

I started using btrfs on my backup drive anyway, nevermind. ;-)

[Steve Bergman]

My clients all run nightly backups. But I've noted many casual users being drawn to the mystique of xfs & getting burned. It *is* a mystique, you know. XFS is exotic & "fast as hell", people think. For the kind of consumer hardware you likely use, you should probably stick with ext4. (ext4 is generally slightly faster on that.) And truth be known, you might do better with ext3. Both ext4 and xfs have some serious problems with unclean shutdowns.

[Steve Bergman]

Make sure to have good backups if you do, You'll need them. I guarantee it.

[Steve Bergman]

His answer to "Can you shrink an XFS filesystem?" alone tells me that XFS is not a filesystem I would use in production. More specifically, the attitude of the developers more than the simple fact that you can't shrink one. That's before you even get to XFS' famous predilection for eating people's data. And besides, at anything below 8 threads, Dave's own slides demonstrate that ext4 still beats the pants off of XFS for most workloads. That covers something approaching 100% of my workloads.

[Telstar85]

ha, it's xfs vs. btrfs is like Vim vs. emacs. I'm a combo breaker and I'll throw JFS in.

[truesightgrabber]

So which version of XFS is in Ubuntu 12.04 ?

[Leonardo Menezes Vaz]

Great talk Dave!