Right now, all of my file systems are formatted as ext3. I have heard that reiserfs is superior, and that I will notice an increase in perormance.

Are there any tools that I can use to convert my existing partitions to reiserfs, keeping the files intact?

i never heard that reiserfs is superior to ext3.
do you have a link on that ...
( describing the noticable speed increase ) ?

the fastest filesystem is ext2 AFAIK, ( just look what gentoo users have... ),
but if you use that, you won't notice any difference in speed.

also i never heard of tools to change ext3--->reserfs.

egag

"Are there any tools that I can use to convert my existing partitions to reiserfs, keeping the files intact?"

Copy your files to another partition. Format the partition as reiserfs. Copy the files back.

-----------------------------
Steve Stites

Theres an program called convertfs
http://tzukanov.narod.ru/convertfs/
But i haven't tried it myself and if it will keep things intact that i can't answer.

Egag, I got this from wikipedia:

Performance
Compared to ext2 and ext3 when dealing with files under 4k, ReiserFS is often faster by a factor of 10–15. This is of great benefit in Usenet news spools, HTTP caches, mail delivery systems and other applications where small file performance is critical.

I don't know if this is backed up, and it sounds like it is restricted to smaller files. I think I am going to try that utility to convert the file system in place. I will post my results.

because it's only valid for files < 4k, i think it's not worth the effort.
the times you're waiting for your disk it's not processing a lot of small files,
but one or more large files.

but if you want to try that fs-change tool...just go ahead and plz. report how well it does.
also back-up important stuff you don't want to lose before you try

egag

Linux Gazette had a very good benchmark of all the journaling filesystems.
It is a bit old so it doesn't have reiser4 but read it because it shows every aspect of filesystem usage.

http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html

If you read the benchmarks, you can decide for yourself the right fs depending on your needs.

I guess, wikipedia may be right, because reiserfs puts all the files in btrees and doesn't use inodes, so you may get a great
benefit for small files.
Also, due to the btrees you save space for small files, because for example a 256 bytes file takes 4096 bytes in ext3 (with
4096 bytes /block). That is why sometimes when you "du" a reiserfs filesystem you get a much larger number than "df"
mentions.

In very little words,
Ext3 is the not so quick filesystem but backwards compatible with ext2, so in a event of a disaster you can "see" the filesystem
from anywhere.
Reiserfs is very good with small files.
XFS is very good with incredibly large files.
JFS is a rather good filesystem from every aspect, but (i don't know for what reason) it is not popular.

Let me tell a last thing.
When you use XFS or JFS you can only grow a partition and not shrink it. So if you use/want-to-use LVM avoid XFS/JFS.

I hope i helped.