Which file system is the best one in Linux?

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!

flypen

Posted 2011-03-09T06:21:56.050

Reputation: 267

Answers

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akira

Posted 2011-03-09T06:21:56.050

Reputation: 52 754

@akira, How could XFS be so fast? Don't they do many redundancy checks to ensure data integrity? – Pacerier – 2014-11-23T09:47:52.040

+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 – 2011-03-09T23:39:53.587

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.

Matt Joiner

Posted 2011-03-09T06:21:56.050

Reputation: 825

1reiserfs 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 – 2011-04-07T00:51:49.703

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

Majenko

Posted 2011-03-09T06:21:56.050

Reputation: 29 007