Best file system for a busy webserver

[Wojciech Puchar]

> Does anyone have any opinions on which file system is best for a busy 
> webserver (7 million hits/month)?  Is anyone one system noticeably better 
> than any other?

Use stock UFS, just configure it properly. most importantly noatime.

Amount of cached data is more important than hit count. Unless your 
webpage is incredibly bad design or constantly load different set of large 
amount of small file - filesystem shouldn't be a limit.

Repetitive file fetches would go from cache.

> Just curious.  I'm getting ready to setup a new box running FreeBSD 9, and 
> since I'm starting from scratch, I'm questioning all my previous assumptions.

Small files will be cached, if you push data from large set of big files 
that will not fit cache, make sure transfers will be fine.

use 32kB block size, 4kB fragment size for UFS

add

options         MAXPHYS=2097152

(or even twice of that) to your kernel config so there will be large 
transfers from disk.

This tuning will not make any harm to small files.


My recommendation is for serving files by WWW (or actually - by any 
means).

If you ask for SQL database subsystem then answer is completely different:

make sure all database fits memory cache, or is on SSD or it WILL BE SLOW 
no matter what you use.

Do everything you can to limit amount of sync writes.

if you use SSD and your database software allow dedicating raw partition - 
do it. If not - it is not crucial but useful, avoid double buffering of 
unix cache and database cache.