FBXL Social

Who here has used btrfs recently?
Does it work well?

@Hyolobrika@social.fbxl.net It seems to perform worse than for me, storing large volumes of data and for databases (PostgreSQL). However, for a very large number of smaller files (tens of thousands, under 4KiB) it seemed to perform slightly better and took slightly less space on-disk to store it.

In practice, it works "okay" enough to use for various setups, but I wouldn't trust it for serious large-volume storage unless you have
very rigorous backups. I've seen it fuck up too often to trust that well. Be sure to avoid ' raid 5/6 at all costs, I haven't heard much problems about their other raid options.

I'm setting up a laptop, not a server.

I ask because the OpenSUSE installer had it selected by default. I'm not sure whether to go with that or Arch though.

@Hyolobrika@social.fbxl.net I don't use either of those distros, so I can't help you. For laptop usage it should be fine to use I guess, its just not my favorite but it should be stable enough for that use case.

@Hyolobrika For laptop use you want either ext4 or f2fs, depending on if the laptop has a HDD or SSD.

Btrfs doesn't offer any real advantage over ext4 unless you want to do RAID.

@Suiseiseki @Hyolobrika isn't F2FS exclusively thought for devices where there isn't an abstraction over the flash memory? i.e not the case for SSDs.

Doesn't copy-on-write make it use space more efficiently?
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@Hyolobrika @Suiseiseki changes which affect filesize may not cause fragmentation but it's not guaranteed, and on a CoW filesystem with low space the changes inevitably lead to fragmentation

whereas on a traditional filesystem it's possible that if the file size is not changing the data could just be changed in place.

@Hyolobrika CoW uses space less efficiently, as you often end up with 2 copies of the same file, although it's useful in the case where the power goes off just as the new version is being written - the old version of the file can be recovered, rather than the file ending up corrupted.