Which one to choose ext4 vs XFS for disk format

raulk89raulk89 Community Edition User

Hi

From vertica 11 onwards, I see that XFS is also supported on RHEL8.

With previous vertica versions I had ext4 format.

What do you think which of these is best suited for vertica..?

Regards
Raul

Comments

  • moshegmosheg Vertica Employee Administrator
    edited October 2021

    Because of the relation between the infrastructure CPU, I/O workload and File System behaver I would recommend to measure the performance on the target server and storage system to make sure you choose the appropriate type of file system.
    In performance tests about 2 years ago the only measurement that showed more than a 2% difference in performance between the Ext4 and XFS filesystems showed that XFS was a bit slower when adding nodes.
    In general Ext4 file system tend to perform better on systems that have limited I/O capability.
    For systems with higher capability, XFS tends to be sometimes a bit faster.
    Note that XFS consumes about twice the CPU-per-metadata operation compared to Ext4, so if you have a CPU-bound workload with little concurrency, then Ext4 will be faster.
    About volume size, Ext4 max file system size on RHEL 6 was 16TB, but now on RHEL 7 and 8 it is 50TB
    While the maximum supported XFS file system image is 500TB for RHEL 7 and 1PB for 8.

  • raulk89raulk89 Community Edition User

    Thanks.
    Also, with XFS there may arise this fragmentation issue as well.

    Ext4 seems reasonable enough for me.

    Regards
    Raul

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