Alright, here's a mail on my filesystems. But please note its a end-user experience rather than a highly scientific study with stats of any kind. Tho i do provide a link where a server admin from Oregon state did that recently.
First and foremost ext2 is a winner for speed because it lacks journalling. So its more or less unfair. Secondly for journalled fs, its slightly dependent on the distro you use since the kernel _may_ be patched for improving the performance on a particular fs. A journal is a sort of double entry to state it crudely. so you don't lose the data even if you crash. It simply reverts to the older copy on disk on next boot. thats faster booting time.
Ext2: This is one of the oldies and the fastest fs on the block. But also the most yuckiest in crash recovery. If you have a nice big installation (most of the libs,devel rpms are in place.) you'll have loong startups after crash. Then again if you are low on space ext2 wastes a little more than others since its block allocation is fixed.
Ext3: Basically ext2 with a journal. Now by general logic one would think that it ought to be nearly as fast as ext2. But no, ext2 wasn't meant to be a journalling fs so its more like an addon to it. A heavy addon which pulls down its performance. There are options to ext3 journalling : ordered,writeback,journal. of which writeback is fastest since journalling is put off for sometime. Now my experience with this has been a little unhappy on a default rh. i guess its their patches. But moment i recompiled my kernel with rc6-ac2 patch to boot i got a good perf. not as good as reiserfs tho.
Reiserfs: This is a fs written from scratch and under heavy development. It uses B+ trees for its structure and consequently packs in more data in smaller space. This option of packing in smaller data into smaller spaces takes a little calculation and hence time. Turn it off by the notail option and you have a fast fs on your hands. Now this fs has a peculiar characteristic. Its fast for small filesizes about 6mb max. beyond this the performance in terms of read/write times degrades a bit.This however is true of current version 3.6 in 4 they claim to have addressed it. Its coming up this month. Its performance in the upcoming 2.5.x kernels is tops. for 2.4.21 the performance goes great with rc6-acX patches. This fs is generally recommended by most. For websites and servers its the best.
As for JFS and XFS: JFS is a unique fs in the fact that you can recover data from JFS in case of a really bad crash by mounting it as ext2 ! Its a fs from IBM and is quite under development. Its performance is good but lower than Reiserfs. XFS is best avoided at present because of its unstability. There have been reports of data corruption in case of crashes. This fs comes from SGI and promises superb performance for big file sizes. For small sizes this isn't good enough.
Now to give you a little conclusion here's what i say : Since most of the binaries, conf. files on a regular linux systems don't go beyond 10mb reiserfs is a really good option. big files are far and few. Here's a little tasty trick for rh 9.0. while installing rh doesn't present reiserfs in disk druid. So when you boot type "linux reiserfs" instead of pressing enter and disk druid will list it. :D
hope that mumbling of mine made sense ! For figures and facts check this out... http://www.net.oregonstate.edu/~kveton/fs/
i'll try to be a little more organized in my next mail,
cya,
C
------ cut here for some gnome/kde 8>< --------- gnome is doing fine for me. others i dunno. thankyou.
I have very good reasons to say that kde is slow even with the latest gcc. Slower than gnome. If there's some special way i could compile kde for faster performance please let me know. And no its not a myth that i am spreading. I could definitely mail the KDE list as you say. Buts thats a little way off track. As they stand now they are slow given their own instructions for compiling and performance improvement.
what a distro includes or excludes is the distro's decision. not others, tho it is the distro's responsibility to respond to the users which Redhat does quite well. and if a user doesn't agree he/she is free enough to change it or ditch the distro.
IceWM! IceWM! Its the coolest one.
??
Google! Google! Its the coolest one :-)
frankly gnome/gtk works for me and am happy. Others did not after having given them a fair trial on my part. End of discussion.
BTW are you sure Abiword and OO.o are Gnome apps?
I never said they were. They use gtk for the "final rendering" as you say and not qt. Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Indiatimes at http://email.indiatimes.com
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