Re: Win32 port powerfail testing

On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 00:34, Adam Haberlach wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 12:27:31AM -0600, Greg Copeland wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 14:36, Dave Page wrote:
> > >
> > > I intend to run the tests on a Dual PIII 1GHz box, with 1Gb of Non-ECC
> > > RAM and a 20Gb (iirc) IDE disk. I will run on Windows 2000 Server with
> > > an NTFS filesystem, and again on Slackware Linux 8 with either ext3 or
> > > reiserfs (which is preferred?).
> > >
> >
> > Please go with XFS or ext3. There are a number of blessed and horror
> > stories which still float around about reiserfs (recent and old; even
> > though I've never lost data with it -- using it now even).
> >
> > Might be worth testing FAT32 on NT as well. Even if we don't advocate
> > it's use, it may not hurt to at least get an understanding of what one
> > might reasonably expect from it. I'm betting there are people just
> > waiting to run with FAT32 in the Win32 world. ;)
>
> You'd better go with NTFS. There are a number of blessed and horror
> stories which still float around about FAT32 (recent and old; even though
> I've never lost data with it -- using it now even now.
>
> Might be worth testing reiserfs on Linux as well. Even if we don't
> advocate it's use, it may not hurt to at least get an understanding of
> what one my reasonably expect from it. I'm better there are people
> just waiting to run with reiserfs in the Linux world. ;)
>
> Regards, and tongue firmly in cheek,

Touche! :P

While I understand and even appreciate the humor value, I do believe the
picture is slightly different than your "analysis". If we make
something that runs on Win32 platforms, might it also run on Win98,
WinME, etc.? Let's face the facts that should it also run on these
platforms, it's probably only a matter of time before someone has it
running on FAT32 (even possible on NT, etc). In other words, I'm fully
expecting the lowest common denominator of MySQL user to be looking at
PostgreSQL on Win32. Which potentially means lots of FAT32 use. And
yes, even for a "production" environment. Ack! Double-ack!

Also, Dave was asking for feedback between reiserfs and ext3. I offered
XFS and ext3 as candidates. I personally believe that ext3 and XFS are
going to be the more common (in that order) of journaled FS for DB Linux
users. Besides, aside from any bugs in reiserfs, testing results for
ext3 or XFS should probably coincide with reasonable expectations for
reiserfs as well.

As I consider FAT32 to be much more fragile than ext2 (having had
seriously horrendous corruption and repaired/recovered from it on ext2),
the results may prove interesting. Which is to say, should testing
prove absolutely horrible results, proper disclaimers and warnings
should be made readily available to avoid its use. Which is probably
not a bad idea to begin with. ;) Nonetheless, it's an unknown right
now in my mind. Hopefully some testing my reveal what reasonable
expectations we should hold so that we can knowingly advise accordingly.

Regards,

--
Greg Copeland <greg(at)copelandconsulting(dot)net>
Copeland Computer Consulting