Effect of filesystem choice onto boot time

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
A recent real-world benchmark suggested that XFS is the top choice for
filesystem performance; reiserfs didn't do very well in that study,
nor did ext3.
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388

The interesting number was the mount time though:
ReiserFS took 5 to 15 times longer to mount the FS (2.3 secs) when
compared to other FS (Ext3 = 0.2, JFS = 0.2, XFS = 0.5), and also 2
times longer to umount the FS (0.4 sec)

That was with a 20 GB partition. Some comments suggest that reiserfs
mount times might go up with the filesystem size: "ReiserFS sucked so
badly I had to buy a spare hard disk to do a data copy & reformat (as
ext3fs) for my main data partition. Mounting the one (250GB) partition
took half of my machine's boot time using ReiserFS, which is
unacceptable for a desktop. With ext3, I can't notice the time it
takes to mount the same partition."

Well, I don't have any benchmarks of my own (especially since I won't
ever touch reiserfs again), but if you are doing some booting work,
you might want to investigate that.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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