Re: Which hardware/filesystem for postgresql?

On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 07:59, Cris Carampa wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
>
> > The best performance results I have seen on Linux systems have
> > involved the use of JFS. I found XFS to be a little slower, and it
> > has the distinct demerit that it is not in the 'official' kernel tree
> > yet, thereby meaning that you have to get into the pain of managing
> > heavily-patched kernels. The "kernel management" issue strikes me as
> > being a much bigger deal than the relatively minor performance
> > difference.
>
> Kernel management is not an issue for me because recent SuSE 2.4.x
> kernels already include XFS support by default.
> What worries me is stability and tolerance to power failures and other
> "bad treatments". I have EXT2 here and I'm happy with it but since the
> servers would be located in client shops I wish to have something that
> doesn't need "human" input in such cases. Have you experienced (or
> heard) horror stories about XFS, expecially related to postgresql? Do
> you think JFS is better than XFS in this field too?

We've used Linux XFS on RAID 0+1 here for some time. I don't see a big
deal with kernel management either, as XFS is a pretty standard option
these days.

I've just received the okay to purchase maxed out SMP Opteron servers
with Fiber Channel storage arrays to run Postgres, and those will be
Linux with XFS file systems as well.

JFS might be just as good or better than XFS performance-wise, but I've
generally avoided it primarily because of the impression that it isn't
as mature or thoroughly tested under Linux as XFS seems to be. And XFS
seems to be generally pretty fast anyway. If you like XFS and are
comfortable with it, I'd say use it.

Cheers,

-James Rogers
jamesr(at)best(dot)com