[Btrfs-devel] btrfs stability

[Chris Mason]

On Saturday 08 March 2008, Rekrutacja wrote:
> hello, i'm considering using brtfs for my free hosting server, i really
> really need performance with lots of files and subdirectories, and only
> reiser4 and brtfs are doing good with large numbers.

I think the most important consideration is that we don't have the developer 
bandwidth to debug critical production issues.  Also, the disk format is 
still changing, and there is no backwards compatibility planned.

So, I would recommend against using btrfs in production today.  Within 5 or 6 
months we will be able to support pilot projects.

>
> i know it's not stable yet, but how crazy would you call moving to brtfs
> a free hosting? only users files of course, the whole system is on ext3,
> it doesn't need performance.
>
> but i have like 100 000 users, all have one directory in
> /var/www/virtual, and it is causing xfs and other filesystems
> performance problems.
>
> is it less stable than reiser4 or more? it surely has more future , but
> what is probiality that by system will hang with millions of files and
> hundreds of operations per second ? like 100% ?

Given the limited locking implementation, concurrency under high load from 
lots of processes will not be very good at all.  I would expect xfs or ext3 
to perform better in these workloads right now.

-chris