Chapter Twenty. Case Study: File System Tuning

By Steve Best

Introduction

Linux provides several utilities for each type of file system for looking at file system metadata and analyzing on-disk structures. With these tools, you can view a file system's structures. Generally, these tools are intended for use by developers of a file system to analyze structures; however, they can also be used to find performance problems.

In this case study, we'll provide examples of viewing an inode on Ext2, JFS, ReiserFS, and XFS file systems. Next, we'll show how to tune each type of file system by using an external log. An external log improves performance because the log updates are saved to a different partition than the corresponding file system. This reduces ...

Get Performance Tuning for Linux® Servers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.