ext4 – how to improve performance
My workstation Linux distro of choice is Ubuntu, right now at version 10.04. Despite the fact that ext4 is default file system in this release, I thought I would stick with ext3 for awhile, but now I think I’ll use ext4 on my next Ubuntu box.
I had never done any real measurement where I would compare for example Oracle XE performance on ext2 vs. ext3 vs. ext4, nor did I experiment with other Linux file systems. I don’t care much about ext4 new feature as much as I do expect from file system on my Ubuntu workstation to perform decently while experimenting with different software (not necessarily Oracle all the time!). On several occasions I got a feeling that sometimes ext4 (ext3) just didn’t perform well but I did not bother to do any research of possible mount option optimization for ext4/ext3.
That’s why I found Nick Gauthier blog, Mount options to improve ext4 file system very interesting, definitely worth a bookmark in the form of this note. And mount options that Nick explained are also valid for ext3!
Posted on 04.08.2010, in Linux, PostgreSQL, etc. and tagged Linux. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
dbaportal.eu 
ext4 on OEL 5.5
I just read Martin blog post about block corruption of database file larger than 3GB created on ext4 partition (OEL 5.5). Ok, as he mentioned ext4 supports starts with >= OEL 5.6, but nevertheless, I found this kind of error so 80’s/90’s!?
Anyway, I like final recommendation mentioned by Martin, referring to Kevin Closson and Greg Rahn, don’t use ext4 for Oracle database files at all, instead use XFS, which makes sense since we’ll be storing large files. However, using Ubuntu 10.04 & 11.10 with portion of storage on NAS I’m a bit skeptic about XFS after seeing many user reports about various errors on XFS mount points. I hope that recently released (>=2010) enterprise distros come with better XFS support.
If anyone wants to try XFS on Ubuntu there are many how-to’s on the Net, you can start with this one.