Arch Linux

ixzus

Member

From: Barcelona (Spain)-Bristol (UK)

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 26

How small is small for a file?

When choosing the filesystem to use I went and read the differences between them. Basically it seems to me that
the main differences are in performance depending on the file size.

Now, the question is they often say this or that fiesystem is good for small files, or good for big files but they never
give you a real size you can use. So when they say small, what size is that for a file? And when they say big, how
big is that? Is an OOO (.odf) file big or small? What about music files (3-5 Mb) or photos (2-4 Mb)?

And how is ext4 now compared to the already existent ones (ext3, jfs, xfs)?

Thank you.

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"If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."  A. Einstein

zyghom

Member

From: Poland/currently Africa

Registered: 2006-05-11

Posts: 432

Website

Re: How small is small for a file?

I compared ext3 with ext4 on my laptop
could not see ANY DIFFERENCE
so, as I'm saying: my laptop - not server, not storage  - just desktop every-day-use

this could have been different if different usage I suppose

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Zygfryd Homonto

Kirurgs

Member

Registered: 2008-10-20

Posts: 144

Re: How small is small for a file?

To me small files are files in size of couple of KBs to couple of MBs, like source code where most of files are under 4KB. Medium files are some docs, photos etc., large files - CD images and stuff. Transition between small, medium, large are tricky, coz see, if one say files are big over 700Mb, he should admit that 400Mb file in fact is not that small either...
I don't really know what do *they* mean saying small, though People usually say that that particular filesystem is good for some purpose, like mail-server, media server (video content) or so.

Personally I use reiser4 on my /home and /opt because of transparent compression, tail packing and speed, but I will never use xfs for that, because xfs is really slow for dealing with small files, especially delete, but I use it at home on my media partition with files > 1Gb, additionally xfs does use more than 99% of space after formatting I'm fed up with ext3 because it constantly corrupted itself after some heavy usage on my laptop which is suspended/hibernated every day (I could recover every time w/o a problem). / is more or less r/o, i left ext3 on there...

Last edited by Kirurgs (2009-02-02 17:27:18)