FreeBSD as Server

[Bill Vermillion]

On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 09:29 , after knocking over a stack of dishes on
the heat sink Alexander
wondered out loud about:

> Alexander Leidinger ?????:
> 
> >Alexander <shulik_freebsd at matrixhome.net> wrote:

> >>http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz - there is comparation 
> >>of Linux FS.


> >Since this doesn't cover the FreeBSD implementations of UFS or
> >UFS2, this doesn't say anything about the reasons why you want
> >to use a different FS on FreeBSD.

> So. Ext2/Ext3 is only modification of UFS and UFS is modification of 
> S5FS. That's why I don't think, that UFS or UFS2 work better than 
> ext2/ext3. But XFS and Reiser has big advantage.

UFS is not a modification of S5FS - which were S51 and S52.
Such concepts as cylinder groups and fragments were new ideas.

Running both the S51 and an AFS [an Acer implementation of 
the BSD FFS[ on the same hard drive in about 1990, I saw
performance increases of up to 10 times on the same hard drive.

Having worked with S51 and S52 [the latter was AT&Ts idea on how to
make things faster that in reality had marginal improvement] and
the FFS variants they really aren't that similar.  The way files
are placed on the hard-drive in the FFS variants as opposed to the
S5? variants also contributed to keep the drives working fast for a
much longer time.  In fact there were file system defragmenters
built and sold for the S5? systems as the awkward and inefficient
way they handled the free-list actually meant you needed to backup
a file system, remake it, and restore as often as ever 6 months in
the S51 systems.  The brand name Unix vendors slowly adopted
a lot of the FFS items from BSD as it was so much better.

I've used XFS on Irix systems and for items that have a lot of
large files or lots and lots of files in a single diretory, it's
one of the best.

To get a good idea of the S51 and FFS differences you should read
Bach's book for SysV and books by Lefler, McKusick et all on
BSD.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com