You can improve the performance of journaling file
systems by taking the time to tune them. There has been
considerable effort placed in the designs to make the file systems
scalable and fast without significant expertise. Just twisting a
few knobs — mount options and placing
the journal on an external device — can make the journaling
file systems run significantly faster.
File systems are part of our everyday lives. We store and retrieve data constantly, but rarely do we think think about how each file system works. Perhaps that’s as it should be: Linux supports many different kinds of file systems, and most are mature and robust. For example, the Linux kernel supports the traditional Ext2 file system (among others), several cluster file systems (Lustre, GFS, GPFS, and CXFS), and also includes no less than four journaling file systems that have been proven time and again in production server environments, where high throughput and near-perennial uptime is essential. (For additional information on journaling file systems, see the October 2002 Linux Magazine article titled “Journaling File Systems”, available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-10/jfs_01.html.)
But journaling file systems need not be limited to servers. Journaling file systems can also benefit client machines, where performance and reliability is often just as critical. However, the jobs assigned to a workstation and the demands placed on a server are radically different. To get the best high throughput and high uptime requirements performance out of both, you have to tune each configuration to suit. Let’s use the open source dbench benchmark (http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/dbench/) to tweak and measure a number of different workloads and see how a little work can yield big results.
The Linux kernel source includes not one, but five journaling file systems: JFS from IBM (http://jfs.sourceforge.net/),
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