Hello all,

What would be a prefered filesystem for a linux file server? Is there such thing as a standard filesystem nowdays, or do different filesystems benefit different uses of a file server?

The latter. Some are good at accessing lots of small files repeatedly, others are better at working on large (>1GB) files. I think ext3/4 is still one of the better "general" file systems if you don't have a specific thing you're trying to do. But ext3 takes forever to delete >2GB files, where something like xfs is cat quick.

Here's sort of a primer. And here are some benchmarks done a few years ago. There's been some stuff on Phoronix recently about ext4 and btrfs which are newer file systems.

If it's a simple, standalone file server, than ext3 or ext4 is good to use. If it's a fileserver that's running a particular type of distributed filesystem such as AFS, than you might want to check with the developers to see what they recommend. If there is anything particular to the type of files you are going to house, also check to see what requirements they need. Check to see what the needs of any Window's clients are.

The file server is to be used to store data for 3D and 2D applications. Files for these applications usually have complex dependencies, hence the need to have one logical volume and a file server to organize and store. The clients are on Fedora, Windows and Mac OS all using the same or similar applications. I'm not going as far as using the file server to edit high resolution video in real time, but the idea is to share files simultaneously, on different platforms. Would you say that ext3 or ext4 would be a relatively safe choice for something like that?