I HATE APPLE

I've had severe performance problems with concurrent access to large files on reiserfs filesystems - "severe" meaning "causing processes to hang in the D-state for several minutes". These problems vanished when I moved the relevant files over to an ext3 filesystem.

Now, that's not going to be a problem for everyone. Not many people have databases with files over 4G in size, like we do. Nevertheless, Reiserfs clearly isn't up to the job for *that* task, and it doesn't have any advantages over properly-optimised ext3 for general fileserving.

I'm not going to get into an experience fight, but I *do* know what I'm talking about when it comes to Linux sysadmin stuff. Just to let you know.

Ext3 is a bag on the side of Ext2 which has been tuned the fuck out, but it is less than optimal design that needs to die.

Whatever the kernel version, I'm certainly not going to use reiserfs again where there is a risk of something like that happening. Yes, I could move off it - I did do - but that involves significant downtime.

Ext3 is a ... less than optimal design that needs to die.

It's fast, fully-featured, and very very solid.

What features does reiserfs have that ext3 doesn't? None that are worth trading the extra reliability for.

Compared to ext2 and ext3 in 2.4, when dealing with files under 4k and with tail packing enabled, ReiserFS is often faster by a factor of 10–15. This is of great benefit in Usenet news spools, HTTP caches, mail delivery systems and other applications where performance with small files is critical.

HAHAHA :(

I'd probably say reiser is ok for a dev workstation for these reasons, but yea, if you ran into those problems, avoid it. I had amazing performance with it being used to torrent tons of stuff while doing lots of huge compile jobs.

By contrast, ext2 and other Berkeley FFS-like filesystems simply use a fixed formula for computing inode locations, hence limiting the number of files they may contain.

A default ext3 filesystem, off the top of my head, has 1 inode for every 4k of disk space. Hence, if your average file size is under 4k then you'll run out of inodes before data blocks. I don't think there are many situations where that is likely to apply.

Most such filesystems also store directories as simple lists of entries, which makes directory lookups and updates linear-time operations and degrades performance on very large directories.

Ext3 doesn't have to, though - it can store directory contents either as a list or a b-tree.

Filesystem comparisons are hard to do, normally, because it's rare to switch between filesystems on one machine.

the gmail+growl site suggests some kind of weird shit is going down. it's been knackered for me since 9.30am BST today.

Also:

http://wizardishungry.com/lol/mail.png

Finally a PEEVE with Apple Mail -- Why doesn't each folder remember which columns you had turned on in it rather than the setup now where the columns are GLOBAL.

by the way, I LOVE TEKSERVE. hardware problem requiring new top casing & trackpad = fixed overnight.

Neither did I, until I started using Gmail. Conversations and fast-searching are such great additions to mail that I'm never going back. Spotlight can search -- slowly -- at home, but what about when I'm not? Mail.app and other clients have pissy little stabs at "threading", but they're all shit compared to conversations. And are useless away from home.

If only Gmail had IMAP, it would be the best of both worlds.

I almost got hit by a car, today! listening to my ipod. luckily it was the guy next to me and I only got hit by him phew

yahoo makes you pay for pop so i don't do that and i'm generally trying to wean myself off it but it still gets used for a couple older mailinglists.

me neither. but i do get very frustrated with them sometimes.

Paul Reiser?

**okay - it's not looking - my mac has tied me up and is forcing me to do it's evil bidding - send help right away. I... oh no... no, I wasn't doing anyth... no please... NNNNOOOOOOOO

(Yes, I'm an idiot for not backing up my files but I bought the external hard drive and couldn't get the computer running long enough to do so.)

Apple Tech is going to call me back. I hope they can make some amends.

I still have Apple care for another year so hopefully the new drive and board will last that long.

My moms told me I should take it to this little Mac stand on Route 1 and I checked they did accept Apple care and they are certified technicians and all that, but for some reason I thought it would be easier to take it in to the store. Next outage I'm gonna see what the mom and pop can do.

Thanks everyone for the advice and support. It's not as traumatic this time around, as it was the last time my computer broke. (It also helps that my mom has an identical computer in the basement for moments like this.)

The only thing I really got screwed on was some pictures I only had on the computer.

I think from now on I'm going back to analog.