On 11/23/05, Nate Straz <nate at refried.org> wrote:

> I've lots of people say the reiser is really good for squid caches.

I've seen documentation relating to the subject, and all, I've deduced
is that file system choice is critical.  People seem to be in
agreement that an unopitmized file system can drag down your suid
performance.  On that note, no one seem to really
offer an opinion at which file system is best.  Reiser has a slight
edge by doing Google searches, but XFS and ext* are out there as well.

> I also just had a thought.  A proxy cache is just a cache for temporary
> files.  They help speed up web access, but they really aren't all that
> important.  So if the file system corrupts itself, you can really
> just mkfs the partition and start over.

Correct.  In fact, I wrote a script for this as it was a problem on
our last proxy box with cache corrupting.  Journaling is not required,
however it will maintain a cache longer without corruption, which
means the proxy server will be more efficient the longer the cache
stays intact.  Journaling does add overhead, but it seeems to win out
performance wise compared to regenerating the cache volume frequently.

I've chosen Reiser as my file system for the volume.  It seems to run
well.  Changing the FS is a simple procedure, especially since this
box isn't production yet.  I'll keep researching the various file
systems and try to determine what's best.

-Brian