I have googled around but couldn't find anything definitive on The pros and cons of the many different filesystems available. I am wanting to host a minecraft server on Slackware and would like to know the best filesystem to use for performance.

While on this topic, could someone explain what good partition layouts there are? I see so many different ones that separate var and tmp but I'm not really sure if any of that is necessary.

Thanks!

In my experience, ext4 is a fast, well-rounder filesystem that can be tuned up for even better performace. Although I take whatever Phoronix puts out with a ton of salt, their tests seem to indicate I've not dreamed up this :-). Some people will say that XFS is the bee's knees but you have to spend a lot of time tuning it up to your liking and OTOH it isn't as fast with small files. If you want raw speed, you can even mount the filesystem without a journal...

Ahh! On the partition thingy. The wisdom has changed a lot. Those schemes with 20 partitions are from the stone age when disks were small and more expensive than solid gold. You'd take your US$100000 worth of disks and quilt them on the filesystem to create a, say, 5 GB super duper fileserver. (Been there, done that).

Today, the best wisdom is: Install the OS in one partition with room to spare, Linux distros don't support separate /usr nowadays anyway, a reasonable swap partition or several in different disks, and the rest for data perhaps using LVM to slice and dice. If you expect heavy use of /tmp you may want to give its own partition with an even faster filesystem (for example, ext4 with no journal) and for /var... These days you can tweak syslog and logrotate to keep log file growth in check.

All the front contenders for filesystems all perform the same necessary functions of serving files. Now I'm sure there are use cases which make one better than another performance wise. With a minecraft server, I can't tell you where you would actually fit (and I slightly doubt that filesystem I/O is a bottleneck for a game server). Now it's pointless to sacrifice stability with performance especially with extra tweaking for fringe features. If I were you, I'd pick a stable run of the mill system, like ext4. If you really want performance, spend the money and buy better hardware.

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ACK on ext4.

There are different reasons why one might have separate partitions.

One reason is safety from a filesystem filling up through runaway processes. Typical candidates are /var and /tmp. I tend to use a tmpfs for /tmp anyway.

Another reason is stability across system upgrades. Typical candidates are /home, /usr/local and /opt.

And then there is paranoia. like I still keep /boot in a separate partition...

Can you explain what you mean by this statement please? I run a dedicated /usr partition all the time - and a separate partition for each of /var, /tmp, /home and /opt. I haven't had a problem yet with any of the Linux or BSD OSes I've used.

"Wisdom", eh? Unless you've experienced nobody being able to login anymore, logging stopping and services not (re)starting partitioning schemes more elaborate than "/ + swap" probably don't make sense to you. And BTW Linux distributions do support separate /usr or whatever else partitions pretty much OK.


While a wee bit old http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/...icated-server/ states "Minecraft servers use little resources so it can run off pretty much any system" so if that's still valid then as far as specs go, this being a Java-based service, what probably matters most is plenty of RAM as you don't want to swap to disk.

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