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Quite a coincidence. I recently went back from XFS to EXT4 in my work laptop using Arch Linux, and before that I went from BTRFS to XFS. I went from BTRFS to X
by m45t3r 9y ago
Quite a coincidence. I recently went back from XFS to EXT4 in my work laptop using Arch Linux, and before that I went from BTRFS to XFS.
I went from BTRFS to XFS because I got some really bad corner case of performance in BTRFS. My work consists of mostly backend development using Ruby web stack and PostgreSQL/Redis, and often my laptop would freeze completely and only get back after a dozen of seconds. This being in a SSD was unacceptable*. So I decided to go back to XFS and for some time everything went well, no more random freezes.
In this weekend I updated my system by running pacman, as usual. Chrome seemed to consume all memory and the system freeze during the update. Ok, not bad I thought, I rebooted and tried to run pacman again, hopping that only some files was corrupted, however sufficient files were corrupted that I needed to reinstall all packages in the system. Another freeze during the update and my system was essentially death after reboot. I tried to recover using chroot however multiple files were broken beyond repair.
So I decided to go back to EXT4, and reading this article does make me more confident that this shouldn't happen again.
- m45t3r 9y agoBTW, I know that database workloads are not optimized in CoW filesystems like BTRFS, and I could disable CoW for PostgreSQL/Redis, however this is just a development machine with maybe a hundred database transactions per second, so this shouldn't be a problem.
- wazoox 9y agoXFS is for server workloads. It definitely doesn't play well with laptops.
- kev009 9y agoHard not to come off smug but as a ZFS user it is always jarring to read anecdotes like this in {{ current_year }}.
- m45t3r 9y agoI am quite curious to test ZFS, however Arch Linux does not maintain official ZFS packages in repositories, so I would need to maintain my own kernel updates just to use ZFS. Not interesting to me, specially considering that this is my work laptop. When (if?) Arch supports ZFS in main repos I will probably test it. That is, unless bcachefs comes first.
- codys 9y ago> maintain my own kernel updates Not really: zfs is available in aur as a dkms package. Pacman automatically rebuilds dkms modules when it updates the kernel. All you'd need to do is modify mkinitcpio.conf to include "zfs" in the HOOKS at the appropriate stage. So: more complicated that just using ext4, but not "maintain my own kernel" level of difficulty.
- szatkus 9y agoHow did you find out that it was filesystem problem?