Re: [HACKERS] Performance while loading data and indexing

Neil Conway wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > The paper does recommend ext3, but the differences between file systems
> > are very small.
>
> Well, I only did a very rough benchmark (a few runs of pgbench), but
> the results I found were drastically different: ext2 was significantly
> faster (~50%) than ext3-writeback, which was in turn significantly
> faster (~25%) than ext3-ordered.
>
> > Also, though ext3 is slower, turning fsync off should make ext3 function
> > similar to ext2.
>
> Why would that be?

OK, I changed the text to:

File system choice is particularly difficult on Linux because there are
so many file system choices, and none of them are optimal: ext2 is not
entirely crash-safe, ext3, xfs, and jfs are journal-based, and Reiser is
optimized for small files and does journalling. The journalling file
systems can be significantly slower than ext2 but when crash recovery is
required, ext2 isn't an option.

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