Sync or Soft Updates or gjournal for fileserver

Wojciech Puchar wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl
Sat Mar 15 08:08:05 UTC 2008


>
> My question is with this setup (Have not assembled or installed yet),
> for a fileserver running Samba to share in mixed environment, what would
> be better, sync, soft updates or gjournal. From my understanding, sync

first - for the same amount of money, use cheaper and larger SATA disks, 
no special controller and RAID1 (gmirror), not RAID5.
while RAID1 "wastes" half space, with large IDE drives you still get more 
space, while SATA drives are slightly slower, you still get FASTER system 
on writes because RAID5 is bad for this, and on reads. gain on not using 
RAID5 will outperform slower drives.

> is the most secure as far as data integrity but suffers from
> performance. Soft Updates is a mix between the two but from reading

soft updates isn't the mix of two - it's much better. you actually get 
sync integrity with almost async performance, but with larger CPU 
usage, which - with modern CPUs - is minimal anyway.

just use them :)

gjournal will actually slow things down, for avoiding fsck on boot.

properly configured freebsd doesn't crash every day so spending an hour 
(at most) on fsck doesn't make a problem.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list