[PlanetCCRMA] disk performance
Michael Curtis
lists@moltenmercury.org
Thu Aug 9 16:24:01 2007
On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:14:14 John Dey wrote:
> Do these changes degrade disk recovery, if needed? Does it make sense
> to have a special partition for real time work and apply these
> suggested options that that file leaving the other file alone? Are
> other fs better for realtime, e.g reiser? Any comments will be greatly
> appreciated.
Empirically, I've had good results with XFS. I definitely noticed it with
Ardour on my relatively slow system - having my recordings on ext3 caused
Ardour to bail out often when seeking through the song (dragging the speed
bar past about 2x would result in a "Disk not fast enough" message). Moving
them temporarily to an XFS partition on the same drive made the problems
disappear - I couldn't break Ardour at that point, no matter how fast I wound
it back and forward.
With XFS you should probably backup regularly, as it behaves poorly if there's
a power failure (excessive in RAM caching, which is what makes it fast).
Personally, I have never lost data and have all my mp3s on the partition, but
power here is relatively stable and very rarely have an unclean shutdown.
Just my 2c
Michael