Speeding Up Ext3

After seeing today's post at KernelTrap on atime and relatime, I spent the time compiling a few of the ext3 speedup tricks I've gathered over the past few years into a single WIKI page.

Hopefully these tips (and future tips added to the page) will help OpenSUSE ext3 users get a little more zip out of their computers.

http://en.opensuse.org/Speeding_up_Ext3

~~ Andrew D.

there isn't much you can do at speeding up Ext3. This FS lacks most of the modern features other file systems like XFS or BTRFS enjoy. Besides of turning on directory indexes and disabling access times on directories and files, there's little you can do. if you don't care much about your files, then you can mount it in writaback mode to increase its performance, but if things go wrong, make sure to have a backup copy of your files

All hopes are now on Ext4 with delayed allocation, extents, preallocation and dynamic inodes. Ext3 is also horrible at fsync, even Linus says that he hates it the way Ext3 does syncing. When you issue a sync call for a specific file, Ext3 doesn't only sync that file to disk but the whole buffer in memory which can be pretty large, thus increasing write access and slowing stuff down

Just because it's not "the best" doesn't mean we can't spend a little time tweaking it for better performance, especially considering it's the default on most distributions. Ext4 will undoubtedly be faster. Until it's widely supported in the various distribution kernels, however, I'll stick with my tuned Ext3.

Just because it's not "the best" doesn't mean we can't spend a little time tweaking it for better performance[/b]

I didn't say that, did I? Read what I wrote, I only said you can't do much in speeding it up. Even if you tweak the hell out of it, it'll still be slower compared to other available file systems for Linux, but IMHO, beats all other file systems when it comes to data-integrity. I also have directory indexes, noatime and nodiratime enabled

I would suggest to take look at format flags for ext3. This will require system re-installation but definitely will add extra juice to fs performance.


for example:
mkfs.ext3 -J size=100 -m 1 -O dir_index,filetype,has_journal /dev/hdX
and then use
tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/hdX

I think that if someone is writing about ext3 performance (or any of fs) formatting options are quite important.

I would suggest changing frequency of fsck which will speed up boot time.