how to convert to ReiserFS ? (Answer: Don't - Reiser isn't that great)

[Nate]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-07-03 at 23:32 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
>   
>> Not only. ext3 is badly suited for notebooks, as ext3 has a forced
>> commit every some (30?) seconds, even if there were no changes at
>> all. Because of that, harddrives will never go to sleep when ext3
>> is used. 
>>     
>
> In my experience, reiserfs is worse suited for laptops because it does
> an atime sync every 5 seconds.
> http://www.namesys.com/faq.html#sync-atime
>
> I think this also prevents the HD from sleeping, but I don't care and
> don't know. What I do care about is noise, and I have removed reiserfs
> from my laptop because the HD sound is quite audible when my apartment
> is quiet and the async sound drives me mad. I seem to hear nothing with
> ext3
>
>
>   
I've had a similar bad experience with ReiserFS. I've gone for the whole 
Reiser thing twice. Each time, the filesystems eventually became 
corrupt, and before they did that, they were always working the disks 
and sucking up memory. ReiserFS, alhtough fast for some things, sucks up 
an /incredible/ amount of memory. Reiser4 actually takes up even more. 
Even with a 512 MB laptop, this was a little much. I'm now happy with 
JFS, which is on average faster than Reiser, more stable, and uses less 
memory. The only drawback is that boot-time takes about three-four 
seconds more because of the occasional automatic fsck.jfs.

Want me to back up my comments about JFS being faster and taking up less 
memory than both the Reisers? Why, sure.

*(Aug, 2001: Theurer does a benchmark test: JFS has much greater data 
throughput than Reiser. http://lwn.net/2001/0830/a/jfs-comparison.php3)

*(Nov, 2001: Scalzo shows that Reiser is shown to be terrible, terrible, 
terrible with RAID and LVM systems. 
http://www.quest-pipelines.com/newsletter-v2/linux2.htm)

*(Oct, 2003: Benoit does extensive benchmarking, coming up with the 
result that for everyday computing, CPU limited applications, and bang 
for your buck, JFS is the way to go, the last field there accompanied by 
XFS. Reiser is shown to have some potential advantage in heavy, 
operations distributed over hundreds of small files, and on SCSI disk 
drives (which the average user doesn't have), but at the cost of a vast 
amount of memory.  JFS is shown to perform an incredibly high ratio of 
Work:CPU usage. Also, JFS is shown to take less time to read and write 
large files [although XFS is the unquestionably the ultimate FS in 
managing large files, JFS compares very favorably to it in these tests 
when you look at the metrics.])

*(May, 2004: Piszcz's first benchmark test, a very famous one: ReseirFS 
has some specific uses that it might be better for, but JFS is about the 
same speed, and takes up a whole lot less memory - 
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html)

*(January, 2006: Piszcz's second article, in which he goes through much 
more meticulous and extensive tests, and this time with the more recent 
2.6 linux kernel. JFS proves to be much faster than ReiserFS and 
Reiser4. http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz)

*(April 2006: Sivers performs a home-server centered benchmark test and 
releases the results on an article on Debian-Administration.org 
Apparently: XFS is great for server, JFS is great for small-time 
applications. ResierFS is STILL very buggy [after all these years of 
supposed active 'bug-fixing.' I don't want to hear any more junk about 
how "they've pretty much fixed all the bugs"] - 
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388)

*(July 2006: This page has an interesting discussion about the 
misleading and selective "benchmarks" on the namesys site 
http://osnews.com/read_thread.php?news_id=15129&comment_id=141566)

Those benchmarks are the same ones which only show Reiser vs. Ext3 (just 
about one of the slowest FSs you can get.) These are the same benchmarks 
that only show results in which reiser does favorably, the ones which he 
performed with "write" and "append" mode off (Reiser can only go that 
fast when it doesn't include file-editing capability, a change would 
speed any FS up dramatically), the ones which he was called on for being 
misleading two years ago, and he said he was wrong and "forgot about it" 
but to this date has not changed those benchmark pages. Not to match up 
with new, up to 30% faster versions. Not to fill in the selectively 
neglected benchmarks. Nothing. What a nice, considerate, honest guy, 
huh? Now why would he need to do something like that if his FS was as 
good as he said it was? The answer is: it isn't as good as he says it 
is, as just about any major benchmark will show.  It's all a bunch of 
hokum pokum and lies.

Face it, guys, namesys (the people who make reiserfs under the 
supervision of Hans himself.) has been pulling the wool over your eyes 
about their "constant improvement and perfection". They're a whole bunch 
of marketers trying to make money off their shoddy FS creation by 
transitioning large businesses to their filesystem, and in a field that 
is relatively virgin to corporate scheming, linux users generally have a 
hard time realizing this. They're a company, Reiser is Han's baby. They 
will lie and do anything they can to make the FS seem effective, because 
pride and profit are on the line and that's what they value most. They 
do alright work, but they lie about it and spin it all over and hype up 
the naive to the degree that they appear revolutionary. The thing is, 
it's just another FS, and not a very good one at that. Better than ext3, 
but uses more memory, and is significantly worse for the home computer 
and home server than JFS and XFS.

This is linux, so if you'd like to use reiser, feel free to do so. If 
you're using reiser happily, by all means continue to do so. However, if 
you're looking for a fast, light, and journaled file system, I'd suggest 
you look into JFS instead of Reiser. For one thing, JFS is generally 
faster and takes up less memory, for the other, Reiser causes a lot of 
trouble. On two different distributions, when I used reiser (and I never 
exceeding about 20-40% of partition use), the partition eventually 
became corrupted. There was nothing I could do about it, and any 
attempts I made at recovery were nonfunctional (when I finally found a 
livedisk that did support reiserfsck, it didn't help, the partition was 
just broken beyond repair). If JFS ever fails you, with JFS being almost 
an industry standard (figure of speech), almost every livedisk has 
fsck.jfs, and that tool has never failed me.

You thinking about switching filesystems? For stability, speed, and 
conservation of system resources, I'm going to preach what has worked 
incredibly for me and ask you to consider JFS in your choice. And I'm 
going to suggest that if you do go for ReiserFS, maintain your skepticism.