FreeBSD as Server

[Patrik Forsberg]

> > UFS2 scales very well on a havy loaded server so I see no 
> reason to use
> > RaiserFS or any other FS in FreeBSD ?
> 
> One good reason, would be journaling, but that isn't 
> necessarily compelling.

true, true!
But aint GEOM journalling coming ? and I saw something about
UFS2-journalling(something like ext3) too ? but those are both in
development so.. still a no-go.

> > I've ran, and is about to do so, a major newfeed machine, 
> which use alot
> > of disk i/o, on UFS2 without any trouble.
> > With softupdate in UFS2 the fsck in case of a crash is very time
> > limited.
> 
> I don't believe softupdates changes the recovery time any significant 
> amount, but it does ensure meta-data consistency.  With 
> background fsck, 
> your startup time can be reduced, which is very nice.

Ah.. yes, but with background fsck you atleast get the system online
quicker then with single-user fsck which can take hours on huge
slices/partitions, altho the system might be alot slower then usual
atleast the services are running.
Newfeed(inn) got real grumpy when the background fsck were running on
its spool disks :>

> > As for XFS and ReiserFS support you do have the support in ports:
> >
> > Path:   /usr/ports/sysutils/progsreiserfs
> > Info:   Utilities and library to manipulate ReiserFS partitions
> >
> > Path:   /usr/ports/sysutils/xfsprogs
> > Info:   A set of utilities and library to manipulate an xfs 
> filesystem
> 
> Note that those are read-only support.

Ah.. figures!
(I did say I havent used them!)

> I have many FreeBSD servers here, that are *VERY HEAVILY* 
> used, and the 
> entire company depends on them.  I have 100's of GB's to tens of TB's 
> hosted on FreeBSD servers, and I'm very happy to say it performs 
> incredibly well, and is very stable.  Both 5.4(STABLE) and 
> 6-STABLE are 
> very solid for serving.

Same same. Most of our hosting and colocation servers that run a *nix
type system are FreeBSD and they all do there job very well.

> One thing to be warned about - the larger the single filesystem, the 
> more memory you will need for fsck's.  Actually, it's more 
> dependant on 
> number of files, but the relationship is there.  Full 2Tb filesystems 
> (for me) require about 2.5GB of memory available for fsck use, YMMV.

True!
Altho with 2Tb FS you probably want alot of MEM anyways, just to keep
the system happy and responsive. Altho over 4G on a 32bit system is a
no-no, alteast in SMP systems.

//Patrik