Ubuntu 10.04 Is Off To A Poor Performance Start

[cliff]

9.10 is stable??

"the current stable release, Ubuntu 9.10."
I would hardly call Karmic Koala stable!!
Half the time my sound pops and crackles the other half of the time I get no sound.
I was trying to use the Gimp the other day and my system totally crashed. Multiple times.
The manual eject button on my DVD drive no longer works.
Transmission, Sauerbraten and others hang on exit and I have to kill X server.
I think it is high time Ubuntu ditches the 6 month release cycle and does some heavy testing between releases!

[hax0r]

YOU ARE AFFECTED!

You have to add ",barrier=1" to your options.
Otherwise there is a big performance penalty.

Thanks! I should start reading lkml.org . Maybe it's time for reiser4, but it looks like it's not going to get merged into 2.6.33. Btw, welcome to phoronix.org

[movieman]

Giving a useful level of data integrity without running slower than molasses has been done too - ext3 does it.

Not exactly: as I understand it one of the biggest performance problems with Linux currently is that an fsync() on ext3 to flush a two-byte file to disk will flush every single byte of cached write data for every single file that's being written to out to disk before it complete... so that two-byte flush might result in 100+MB of writes to multiple different locations on the disk.

Ultimately, getting good performance and reliable data storage at the same time is hard.

[kraftman]

Who is exactly affected by ext4 bug? I'm using "data=writeback,noatime,nodiratime" options.

It's not a bug.

[kraftman]

"the current stable release, Ubuntu 9.10."
I would hardly call Karmic Koala stable!!
Half the time my sound pops and crackles the other half of the time I get no sound.
I was trying to use the Gimp the other day and my system totally crashed. Multiple times.
The manual eject button on my DVD drive no longer works.
Transmission, Sauerbraten and others hang on exit and I have to kill X server.
I think it is high time Ubuntu ditches the 6 month release cycle and does some heavy testing between releases!

Better check if your hardware is stable. This manual eject button works in Kubuntu and afaik didn't work in Ubuntu since release (it's probably DE problem or something - in KDE there's a service running which let you to eject your DVD manually). Btw. Kubuntu is rock stable here, so like I said it can be something with your hardware.

[PerfMonk]

Just some precisions,

I reported the journal as being corrupted : I was wrong.
This is the FileSystem that can get corrupted even if the journal is not. Let me explain... The new drives will try to optimise drive access by ordering writes physically close together. If you have let say 3 writes to do, then the number 3 can be written before the number 2 because it is physically closer to actual position of the head. This does not play well with a journaling filesystem. You have to write something first in the journal and then wite to the disk. But if for optimisation the write to a bloc of a file is written before the actual write of the journal and if the system lose power in between those 2 writes, your filesystem can become inconsistent even if EXT4 has a journal and a checksum to validate the journal content. This is your filesystem that become incorrect, your journal has never seen this change you did...

I'm sure that Mr. T'so and all the EXT4 guys are working hard to correct this ASAP (see http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kerne...60256d1d726fdc)

Regards,

BT

[Jimbo]

Ubuntu 10.04 Is Off To A Poor Performance Start

The title is alarmist!!

EXT3 or EXT2 or XFS or BTRFS or ... + nvidia or intel gfx drivers = Good performance

The exception, ext4 (with barriers) and ati drivers (open source).

[walkeer]

weird HW used

First of all, thank you very much for your efford in linux testing and benchmarking, I finally found great server that cares about linux benchmarks.
Just one question: why you run this test on overclocked CPU and very small and very slow HDD? I dont say that using some "normal" and fast HDD like WD WD6400AAK would produce totally different results, but combination of very fast overclocked CPU and very slow HDD is a little bit weird in my opinion.