Ask Slashdot: Best File System For Web Hosting?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm hoping for a discussion about the best file system for a web hosting server. The server would serve as mail, database, and web hosting. Running CPanel. Likely CentOS. I was thinking that most hosts use ext3 but with of the reading/writing to log files, a constant flow of email in and out, not to mention all of the DB reads/writes, I'm wondering if there is a more effective FS. What do you fine folks think?"

Whatever is the best with the given OS

[mikeken]

Typically, that is the default file system. That is how you will get the best support when there is an issue. It will also be the most stable with your OS because the developers focus on that FS. So personally, I would use whatever is the default FS for whatever OS you decide to use. To get off topic a bit, IMHO that OS should be Debian because it is just too awesome and Debian based OS's have the largest community. Also, it should be running on Linode.com ;)

Turn off the last accessed time stamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially if you decide to use a SSD. Even if there's not alot of data writing going on the constant rewriting of the directory entries to update the last accessed time stamp would wear an SSD and slow a regular hard drive.

Re:XFS for huge mailqueues, otherwise EXT3 or EXT4

[spacey]

From memory (I've been out of that business for 6 months) CPanel stores mail as maildirs. If you have gazillions of small files (that's a lot of email) then XFS handles it a lot better than ext3 - I've never benchmarked XFS against ext4. Back in the day, it also dealt with quotas more efficiently than ext2/3, but I really doubt that is a problem nowadays.

If you aren't handling gazillions of files, I'd be tempted to stick to ext3 or ext4 - just because it's more common and well known, not because it is necessarily the most efficient. When your server goes down, you'll quickly find advice on how to restore ext3 filesystems because gazillions of people have done it before. You will find less info about xfs (although it may be higher quality), just because it isn't as common.

XFS is probably better for large maildirs, but ext3 in recent kernels has much better performance on large directories starting in the late 2.6 kernels. It doesn't provide for infinite # of files per directory, but it doesn't take a huge hit listing e.g. 4k files in a directory anymore.

Re:ext4 unless there's a good reason not to.

[Vanders]

The good reason not too is that I don't need to log in at 3am to type the root password and watch it fsck should it need an unclean reboot. Use XFS.