[linux-audio-user] is ext3 ok for real-time / low-latency?

[Jan "Evil Twin" Depner]

Converting to reiserfs is a pain but no fsck'ing on boot is worth it. 
If you're not going to use that though I would use ext2.  Like you, I've
never lost an ext2 disk due to a crash.  I have let the smoke out of a
couple of disk drives though :-)

Jan

On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 08:44, Larry Troxler wrote:
> On Saturday 15 February 2003 08:57, Jan \"Evil Twin\" Depner wrote:
> > I have copies of Mark Knecht's benchmarks on my web page :
> >
> >  http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/Arcana.html
> 
> That's a good link - thanks.
> 
> Man, there's so many factors to think of it. I was especially boggled to hear 
> that the disk drive cable I'm using might be a culprit. Arggh! Who can keep 
> track of all this?
> 
> >
> > as well as a write-up explaining why you shouldn't use ext3.  It
> > basically comes down to the fact that ext3 is using a separate file to
> > handle the journal.  What this means is that as you write your audio
> > data, every once in a while, the system has to write to a different file
> > in a separate location on the hard drive. 
> 
> Yeah, that's what I was concerned about. 
> 
> > It will depend on how close
> > the files are physically to each other, disk latency, and a host of
> > other things but, eventually, you will see problems with ext3.  It's not
> > hard to convert to reiserfs (instructions (destructions?) are included
> > on the above page) so why not. 
> 
> Looks like you can't convert non-destructively though. What a pain.
> 
> > Reiser journals are kept with (as part
> > of?) the files - you don't have to run fsck after a crash.  A real
> > intersting thing to note is that reiserfs actually seems to be faster
> > than ext2 for what we're doing.
> >
> 
> fsck'ing is a pain, yes, but if it needs to be done too often there's other 
> problems :-) so for me, ext3 is nice, but not needed I think. I have had bad 
> shutdowns over the years quite often on ext2, and although it's not nice to 
> wait for it to come back up, I've never had a case where I had to do a manual 
> repair.
> 
> Larry Troxler
> 
>