BTRFS vs EXT4

[[Emotionlord]]

I did a clean reinstall of my OS today and attempted to redownload my steam library games after (UBUNTU 15.10 and BTRFS). I would consistantly get a "connection timeout error". I tried all of the troubleshooting tips online and could not get ANY games to download. After 6 hours I reinstalled my system and this time I used EXT4 as my filesystem. Everything is now working perfectly.

I dont have definitive proof but I suspect that the BTRFS filesystem was causing the timeout to happen.

What do you think?

[Drako Frost]

Maybe it was just a momentary issue, Steam become partially or entirely offline quite often. Or maybe it was a regional server issue.

Anyway, BTRFS is not exactly reliable, EXT4 is faster and safer.

[Ari El Uno]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41-filesystem

[kergan]

Originally posted by Ari El Uno:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41-filesystem

thats a good read

[DirtyCamper]

I have my steam partition on btrfs on bcache on ssd as cache and fcoe as storage... never had a problem.
So it is not a btrfs problem. There are a lot of btrfs problems one can encounter (like self-corruption and such), but timeouts is not one of them. *unless* you have a hanging btrfs, but usually that means your blockdevice is bad. Anyway: I have seen a lot of btrfs mayhem. This is not one of them.
When I have the time I will try to pxe-boot steam-os, use bcache on ssd+fcoe and really start bugreporting on it ;-).
Combination of bcache and fcoe rocks btw... I have an always on NAS that serves safe storage using fcoe. bcache lowers the access time. And on the client side you only need a kernel with fcoe and you must echo the network device into a sysfs file.

[resonant7hand]

I was previously running Ubuntu with BTRFS & had lots of problems with games so I had to reinstall with Ext4 & new everything is fine

[The Muppet Surgery Special]

Try XFS if you want a high performaing journalling File System if you don't want to use ext4.

Btfrs is based on B-Trees (not B+Trees due to the linked leaf nodes for copy-on-write performance hits). B+Trees are used in database indexes, gives both seek and search capability in Logarithmic time (O(log_2 n) for seeks on the tree, O(n/2) average for linear search on the leafs). B+Trees are one of the most performant data structures we know off (it is even extended to work for spacial data in the form of R Trees).

XFS is used for databases for performance in FB (Btrfs is too slow for high performance database use hence XFS). http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-storage-futures/

But for normal use, ext4 is fine and dandy for everyday use, unless you have a specific requirement and check the specific capabilities of a file system, stick with the normal ext4. Just because something is labled "the future of" placebo sticker doesn't mean you should jump onto it. You really need to do some due dilligence.

If you wonder what B-+Trees are

https://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/BTree.html
https://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/BPlusTree.html

And also youtube for animations and explainations.

Remember Microsoft's WinFS? The "database" filesystem (Longhorn *cough*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

We've been trying to turn the filesystem into a database system for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

[The Muppet Surgery Special]

Originally posted by DirtyCamper:

I have my steam partition on btrfs on bcache on ssd as cache and fcoe as storage... never had a problem.
So it is not a btrfs problem. There are a lot of btrfs problems one can encounter (like self-corruption and such), but timeouts is not one of them. *unless* you have a hanging btrfs, but usually that means your blockdevice is bad. Anyway: I have seen a lot of btrfs mayhem. This is not one of them.
When I have the time I will try to pxe-boot steam-os, use bcache on ssd+fcoe and really start bugreporting on it ;-).
Combination of bcache and fcoe rocks btw... I have an always on NAS that serves safe storage using fcoe. bcache lowers the access time. And on the client side you only need a kernel with fcoe and you must echo the network device into a sysfs file.

I love the self-corruption feature in file systems myself :)

Definatly top of the wish list.

I recommend you play about with a new filesystem in either a new partition or a virtual machine, somewhere with no / low risk.

[Unranked]

Hi

[Unranked]

d

[900kg]

+rep