FreeBSD as Server

[Eric Anderson]

Patrik Forsberg wrote:
>>> 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.
>   

Yes, ufs2-journaling is being worked on by Scott Long and a SoC 
developer, but I think the project is stalled, not 100% certain on that 
though.  gjournal, at least the original implementation, does not stop 
you from having to fsck - it is there merely as a means to roll-back 
block changes, but ignores the filesystem.  While handy and interesting, 
not useful for filesystem consistency.  Now, I've heard that it is being 
re-implemented, and may provide different features. 


>>> 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 :>
>   

Yea, for me, I want the service online, even if it is slow.  For me, 
slow means work continues, and systems keep running - offline means $$.


>>> 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.

Very true..


Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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