Comments on: To do: data=journal in ext3

By: ext3 with data=journal results « Motho ke motho ka botho

ext3 with data=journal results « Motho ke motho ka botho — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:13:03 +0000

[...] Ubuntu installation identical to the one I built for the Hardy speed guide, but this time I used data=journal as a flag for the default ext3 filesystem. Boot time results were a second slower than a clean [...]

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:17:26 +0000

That’s good to know. I’ll give it a try this weekend and see what happens. It might be oversimplifying things, but personally I’m only interested in desktop performance, for simple things like starting up and opening a browser. If the benefits appear only at particular times or during particular workloads, I’m not as interested.

By: reacocard

reacocard — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:47:18 +0000

It does in fact improve interactive performance, I’ve tried it myself on both arch and ubuntu with a recent computer (core 2, 2GB). However, as you expect raw I/O performance is NOT increased, instead it is drastically decreased, to around 1/2 of its normal value. However, for most tasks this difference is overshadowed by the interactive benefit obtained. I didn’t notice any significant change in boot times, maybe 1-2 seconds, but file copying was much slower. On the other hand, no matter how much file activity was going on applications remained completely responsive, unlike with normal ext3. Its worth a try if you don’t frequently need to work with large files.