Best file system for a busy webserver

[Paul Schmehl]

--On August 16, 2012 9:42:30 PM +0100 Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve at sohara.org> 
wrote:

>> I don't even know where to begin.  There's about 15G of data on the
>> server.
>
> 	OK I would say there's no pressing reason to consider ZFS for this
> purpose. You'd save a bit of time in crash recovery with no fsck going on,
> and perhaps the checksum mechanism would give some peace of mind - but
> really in 15GB silent corruption is a very slow process - now if it were
> 15TB ...
>

Thanks.

>> last pid: 40369;  load averages:  0.01,  0.03,  0.00
>> up 104+09:33:44 13:14:49
>> 137 processes: 1 running, 136 sleeping
>> CPU:  0.7% user,  0.0% nice,  0.1% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.2% idle
>> Mem: 229M Active, 6108M Inact, 1056M Wired, 15M Cache, 828M Buf, 514M
>> Free Swap: 16G Total, 28K Used, 16G Free
>
> 	OTOH you have plenty of memory lying around doing nothing much
> (6108M inactive) so you can easily support ZFS if you want to play with
> it's features (the smooth integration of volume management and filesystem
> is rather cool).
>

It's hard, nowadays, to buy a server that's too small for our needs.  Most 
of them are way overspec'd for what this server does.  Which is a nice 
luxury to have.
 >
> 	It sounds like you have backups or at least some means of restoring
> the site in the event of disaster so that's all good.

Yes, daily, and the servers are always configured in RAID1.

> If there was a
> pressing need to be able to get back up fairly quickly and easily I'd be
> suggesting ZFS in RAID1 with a hot swap bay in which a third disc goes,
> attached as a third mirror, periodically split it off the mirror take
> it off site, and replace it with the one that's been off site.
>
> 	There's really nothing here that's pushing you in any particular
> direction for a filesystem, at 15GB if performance ever becomes a problem
> a RAID1 of SSDs with UFS would make it fly probably into the hundreds of
> hits per second range.

Thanks for the input, Steve.  I appreciate it.

-- 
Paul Schmehl, Senior Infosec Analyst
As if it wasn't already obvious, my opinions
are my own and not those of my employer.
*******************************************
"It is as useless to argue with those who have
renounced the use of reason as to administer
medication to the dead." Thomas Jefferson
"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very
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