Well, it's junk for me.

Here's the story:
Once upon time I used to work for a government business. I had a mail server running Debian. One nice day we had several power breaks in short intervals, somehow UPS couldn't manage it, the mail server stopped responding. When I arrived it still was running but the file system was fubar. All reiserfs tools gave nothing but strange errors. I was totally stumped. The Bad Thing (TM) was our business was under audit investigation, there were some very damn important forms emailed to my Big Boss. He never got these and missed the deadline. I'll stop here, do not like to recall bad memories.

I can't explain it (take it as is) but I also experienced lost files with reiserfs. Same for xfs. Don't ask me why! I have no time to investigate and nothing against these FS. Actually ext3 wouldn't have evoluated like this without reiserfs.
This month I'm developping a kernel driver and the kernel locks 40 times or so. I have not experienced one single lost file with ext3.

And I think all the concepts introduced by reiserfs have now been introduced in ext3 and that's probably why Suse went to ext3. There's recent info about this on the web but can't find it..

There's another benchmark here:
https://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
(long reading)
When I read the initial post, it was not representative. I didn't read it since then.

When I first set up my server, I used reiser as that was the Slackware default. After a couple of filesystem corruptions and reinstalls I decided to stick to ext3, which has never caused me any problems. As others have pointed out, my saying this doesn't prove anything, but personally I wouldn't use reiser on a new install again. That said, my work computer uses reiser for its root partition and I've never had any problems with that. The work computer is newer and better looked after than the server (which was made out of old spare parts), so maybe reiser is less good for recovering from the problems potentially caused by slightly flaky hardware.

SUSE's/Novell's rationale for switching to ext3:

http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/2...-it-default-fs

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/2120204

I use a combination of EXT3 and XFS for my Linux installs. EXT3 for /boot and /var/log. Then XFS for everything else. ReiserFS is unreliable and it has horrible tools to fix itself. XFS is superior to EXT3 and ReiserFS because it has fast mounts, fixes, and handles small and large files wel. However, XFS needs a computer with at least 512 MB of RAM to do well.

Thanks to XFS, it did a great job with sector corruption and partiton table corruption. About 99% of files were retrieved with out any noticable problems. The other 1% of the files were useless.

It`s common knowledge that XFS has severe problems with power failures.

For XFS, yes that's by design. Using XFS without a UPS is suicidal! Anyway for me this FS was too complex to tweak and it was not adapted for my desktop machine. And I do have 512Mb but it's the CPU that goes crazy (I also think this is by design). Probably the cpu is better used but it added to much latency for me.
After making my own benchmark (using iozone) for several use cases, I have found that they (xfs,ntfs,reiser3,ext3) are similiar on the mean. I wanted to speed up my debian package database (lots of little files). No way. I was surprised that the original ntfs kernel driver was the quickest on some read access (but amazing horrible on others..) I didn't try JFS yet.
If you have specific need, like for servers with big databases, then you will get good improvement by trying/tweaking other fs.
For desktop use with complete different tasks.. I think it doesn't matter.
Poor windows with its only 2 Filesystems.. booh

There are some recent benchmarks here:

http://linuxhelp.150m.com/resources/fs-benchmarks.htm

Plus: Exciting conspiracy theories!!!! Why is Hans Reiser in jail solved et al!!!

Oh well - maybe the benchmarks are not that trustworthy :-)

That is load of bull. I have been using XFS for several years now. It works well even if the power abruptly went out.

The format options that I used for XFS are the following.

block = 512 bytes or 1024 bytes
agcount = 32
extsize = 8192 bytes or 16384 bytes

Still I never experience data corruption when using XFS.

Yes I understand. I see that you are using 2.6.16 of the kernel.
My experience:When I was trying XFS, I was using a testing distro (bleeding edge) for development.
And, in kernel 2.6.17 (which I installed the same day as the release), an important regression appeared in XFS. At this time, the default tools to repair xfs did not do their job on my system. I was left with an unusuable disk until the bug was corrected/documented
This was too much for me: The above reasons in my other posts + this bug convinced me that XFS is not for my desktop PC and the use I make about it. Also my benchmarks were probably wrong because I noticed not a single performance increase but the opposite (due to intensive cpu usage and the process using the files not using the cpu enough)
I would like to try it again for my /var (some dir contains +1000 files) but I am just too scared that I loose again some files during kernel lockup/powerfail.

Be careful using anything or any advice from wikipedia. Anyone can change an entry and there are many entries that are blatantly wrong. Furthermore, when someone tries to change the wrong information you frequently find there are little territorial nerds who change it back to the wrong information (I assume to protect "their" forum for their opinion, even if it is based on bad or outdated information).

Sorry, as a professor, I just get riled whenever wikipedia is mentioned.

Back to reiserfs causing problems. I have just had 2 computers at work have the same file corruption that caused me to post this thread. I have had to re-install linux on both because the tools to fix reiser kept saying the file system was fixed, but the problem persisted when I tried to reboot. I have now moved both work computers to ext3

So what? I had data corruption with ext2,jfs,xfs and reiser4 - not completely unexpected.
Never had a problem with reiser3 but that could also hit any time.

There are people experiencing data corruption with every file system out there.It's not just the file system.It also depends on the hardware.On one box I just couldn't run ext2/3.Did get corrupted even w/o power failures or anything at all.

On another jfs just crashes and burns.

Stuff is going to happen no matter what you use.If x doesn't work on your machine use y.
Would be nice to know before it happens but unfortunately nobody can guarantee that to you.

Getting reliable info from wikipedia is pretty much the same as military intelligence.

Hmmm ... Are you saying it's like a lottery? Are you saying people have equal chance of filesystem corruption regardless what filesystem is used?