Didn't know where to put this thread so I put it here

I have a dual booting machine with XP and Mandrake 10.1 Community

HDD's as follows :

hda: XP, NTFS (primary master) 40GB
hdb: NTFS (primary slave) 40GB
hdc1: /boot , ext3 (secondary master) 100MB
hdc2: / , XFS , 30 GB
hdc5: linux swap 1 GB

First I installed Mandrake with LILO on MBR...after discovering that LILO would be better of on it's own partition I reformated to the setup above.
(and removed LILO from MBR/restored MBR)

HERE IS THE STRANGE THING:

When I had Mandrake running on ext3 filesystem, things went smooth.
After reformatting/installing , this time with XFS, Konqueror says "stalled" (but don't hang) when I open large directories. They open eventually (5-15 seconds), but this happened like a bullet before when using ext3.

I am new to linux, so the reason I changed to XFS filesystem was because that was suppose to be better with large files and directories. Have I been misinformed??

Any thoughts on this appreciated!

As said: Konqueror browsing ext3: smooth.
Browsing XFS: NOT so smooth..


BTW: My definition of "large" directories is 1000++ files



Hope someone has an idea...!

use ReiserFS i say ....... and XFS is probably slow because of your computer, it was designed for high performance computers, not desktops

changed back to ext3 and everything back to running excellent...well, at least I've learned so much

XFS is designed for machine with a shitload of RAM, unless that's you (and 512MB/1GB is not shitloads) it won't be much benifit. it's fast because it uses your RAM and only reads/writes to disk when it has to. Super fast if you can support it, probably pretty average if you can't.

Well, I have 512 MB DDR RAM, so I guess that's more decent than it is loads of it


If I should build a server with 2 GB RAM ++ than I'll try XFS once more......the specs (from what I can tell) seems impressive

Yeah that probably wouldn't cut it. Here's a good description taken from the Gentoo documentation.

yes, here are the listings of FS's in order from lowest specs to highest:

- Minix (FAT/FAT32 here to) / tempfs ..... extremly limited file systems, good for small jobs tho
- EXT2/3 .... better
- JFS ...... a step up, the specs would suit most desktops
- RieserFS ....... excellent, quit scalable, fast, and uses space efficiently on the drive (with version 4, its faster, and supports plugins ... could offer encryption/compression in plugins ...version 3.6 its quite stable)
- XFS ..... only good for high end systems

i recommend RieserFS (thats because i have a grudge against EXT2/3 .. it corrupted on my 233MHz laptop, since then i used RieserFS (and Minix for small partition like /boot and floppies)) .... it works quite well if you cant afford the overhead of XFS, and the specs are way more then anything a desktop will use (even servers will have a hard time getting near its limitation) .. but the XFS specs are better, but with numbers so big on both FS's, does it really matter for most uses?