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I often use ext3. But the performance is not good if there are thousands of files in one directory. Deleting old files also take a very long time. I want to switch XFS, but someone said that it was not stable and he ever met some serious crash problems.

I hear btrfs is good. Can someone introduce it with his own experience? And how about ext4?

Thaks!

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Mar 9 '11 at 6:30

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just stumbled upon:

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+1, although I do wish that there'd be one including more than just ext* and `xfs. There are indeed many more than that. – new123456 Mar 9 '11 at 23:39
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My experiences:

  • reiserfs: The best until ext4 came along. Very fast and stable at most operations.
  • ext3: Rock solid. The best choice for predictability.
  • ext4: Numerous bugs. Use with the latest kernel. Best all round choice since Lucid.
  • btrfs: Not ready. There are some really stupid bugs that will trip you up. (Such as corrupting on ENOSPC).
  • xfs: Good for storage. Never had a proper need for it. Reiserfs and ext4 are better in every way.

Just to emphasise: Use ext4 unless you're using an old kernel, in which case use ext3.

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reiserfs is not a good file system. It has edge cases where the implementers chose speed over correctness, yielding a file system that can corrupt itself, or at least your data, on unexpected power-down. It's OK for a few applications that can miss data, such as news spools, but for reliability ext3/ext4 and XFS beat it hands down. XFS is a good file system, particularly for large files, but it is a port to Linux from IRIX. – Michael Ekstrand Apr 7 '11 at 0:51
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No one seems to have mentioned ZFS. True, on Linux it's only available as a FUSE filesystem, so you'd have to use something else like ext4 for your root, but for large file systems and RAID systems IMHO it really can't be beaten.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

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