one directory with 500 000 files (5-8mb each)

[Rob Mueller]

> The biggest issues that I know of when running ReiserFS are 1 -
> misdesigned fsck - it's architected as such if it comes to having to
> run  the fsck on Reiser for crash recovery the odds are you will end
> up with garbage instead of restored files. Theodore Ts'o has a nice

The biggest problem occurs if you store loop back filesytem dumps within a 
file. When it does a fsck it scans all the data, so it'll see what looks 
like filesystem metadata, even though it really was within a file.

If you don't do that though, fsck has worked fine the few times we've had to 
use it, albeit it is slow. In fact, it's worked better in most cases than 
ext3's fsck which often seems to lose which directory files were in and move 
them to lost+found. That's just our experiences though, YMMV.

> 2 - Its reliablity for e-mail systems is AFAIK uncertain. e-mail

And where do you get that belief from? reiserfs also has data=journal and 
data=ordered modes, which provide the same consistency guarantees as other 
filesystems with those modes. data=ordered has been the default mount mode 
for ages.

> 3 - ReiserFS's fufture is uncertain due to Hans' troubles.

reiser3 is stable, touched very little, and hasn't had direct input from 
Hans in years. reiser4 is a different matter though.

I think the biggest issue is that SUSE was using reiser3 as the default 
filesystem, but dropped it. reiser4 seems to have been crawling for years 
never getting "stable" and I'm not convinced it every will. It also fails to 
solve the data integrity problem that's becoming so prevalent with large 
volumes these days. I think COW + checksummed filesystems like btrfs are the 
ones to keep an eye on for the future.

Rob