best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

poopship21 · 2009-08-29 04:05:26

this is a pretty open question since i dont specify the criterion of excelence (perhaps reliability or performance?). i come with nothing more than a cursory knowledge of the topics covered in Nemeth,E (2008) and the will to optimize.

-all mounted volumes are on a local consumer sata hdd (1tb wd "re3") which is sold as a non-scsi raid device

-as such this drive does not implement some of the more consumer-critical "safety" features of other wd drives. apparently some of the robustness of raid parity is supposed to compensate for these limitations, whatever they may be (please advise). right now i am stuck with this drive as my only drive

T I A

Last edited by poopship21 (2009-08-30 03:47:07)

Wintervenom · 2009-08-29 04:39:04

The best file system for Firefox is to let it use only RAM by disabling disk caching. If you need your cache to stick around longer (e.g., dial-up, browser crashes, etc.), then make binds to /dev/shm, and set Firefox's cache directory there.

#!/bin/bash
### Bind temporary directories to /dev/shm ###
# I do this instead of mounting tmpfs on the #
# directories, so less memory gets wasted.   #
##############################################
mkdir /dev/shm/{tmp,lock}
mount --bind /dev/shm/tmp /tmp
mount --bind /dev/shm/tmp /var/tmp
mount --bind /dev/shm/lock /var/lock
chmod 1777 /dev/shm/{tmp,lock}

As for the torrenting, you probably want Ext3 -- the safest choice -- or Ext4, if you need the performance benefits and you're feeling slightly more adventurous.

Last edited by Wintervenom (2009-08-29 04:39:52)

djszapi · 2009-08-29 05:10:47

"As for the torrenting, you probably want Ext3 -- the safest choice -- or Ext4" I wouldn't say for EXT3 this, but as many house as many using I use reiserfs for performance reason.

poopship21 · 2009-08-30 04:25:20

thanks for that tip wintervenom. i disabled the disk caching feature in firefox via about:config and it seems to help on a laptop (for sure there is no negative affect). if i read your script correctly, the script above is going to make any application (that normally caches to /tmp and /var/tmp) actually address shared system memory. is this going to adversely affect any other applications? thanks

lucke · 2009-08-30 04:43:29

XFS and ext4 can instantly preallocate space for downloaded files, which minimizes fragmentation and thus improves performance - one needs to fiddle a bit to make rtorrent use that functionality, though.

methuselah · 2009-08-30 04:58:02

poopship21 wrote:

thanks for that tip wintervenom. i disabled the disk caching feature in firefox via about:config and it seems to help on a laptop (for sure there is no negative affect). if i read your script correctly, the script above is going to make any application (that normally caches to /tmp and /var/tmp) actually address shared system memory. is this going to adversely affect any other applications? thanks

Check this wiki out: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Spe … sing_tmpfs

and here is another page: http://www.verot.net/firefox_tmpfs.htm

R00KIE · 2009-09-01 14:12:04

@Wintervenom
Why not create an extra dir to mount /var/tmp ? Something like

mkdir /dev/shm/{tmp,vartmp,lock}
mount --bind /dev/shm/tmp /tmp
mount --bind /dev/shm/vartmp /var/tmp
mount --bind /dev/shm/lock /var/lock
chmod 1777 /dev/shm/{tmp,vartmp,lock}

poopship21 · 2009-11-26 16:00:58

thanks R, that would eliminate worries. maybe im still getting used to the casual nature of OS scripting in linux. novelty banishes common sense pretty efficiently sometimes.

poopship21 · 2009-11-26 16:06:02

lucke wrote:

XFS and ext4 can instantly preallocate space for downloaded files, which minimizes fragmentation and thus improves performance - one needs to fiddle a bit to make rtorrent use that functionality, though.

im a beginner so thanks in advance for your patience. i was under the impression that delayed write is a feature that applies whenever a device whose filesystem supports delayed write is mounted on the directory being written. implicit is the idea that delayed-write is a transparent feature to such write operations. so my questions are:

1) are you talking about simply asking rtorrent to pre-allocate its downloads?

2) are you saying that chunks of an unfinished download can be written to the disk in a more concerted way? this would have no affect on fragmentation but would affect i/o-limited performance, which i thought was another goal of delayed-write.

Last edited by poopship21 (2009-11-26 16:21:26)

gen1s · 2009-11-26 16:47:07

I am using JFS for firefox profile and pacman database. It is much faster for me. Reiser4 is good choice too.

lucke · 2009-11-26 19:39:37

If you download a 4GB file over a long period of time, it's sure to be chopped into thousands of extents, even with delayed allocation. The trick is to preallocate the needed space - all other filesystems just write zeroes there, which takes a lot of time, XFS and ext4 use a special system call which allocates the space instantly.

http://lwn.net/Articles/226710/

Arch Linux

#1 2009-08-29 04:05:26

best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#2 2009-08-29 04:39:04

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#3 2009-08-29 05:10:47

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#4 2009-08-30 04:25:20

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#5 2009-08-30 04:43:29

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#6 2009-08-30 04:58:02

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#7 2009-09-01 14:12:04

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#8 2009-11-26 16:00:58

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#9 2009-11-26 16:06:02

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#10 2009-11-26 16:47:07

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

#11 2009-11-26 19:39:37

Re: best filesystem for firefox, rtorrent?

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