Performance of Large Journaling File Systems

Linux file system sizes have grown rapidly over the last few years with a size of several terabytes being common. This is especially true in the mainframe area for applications like database systems or large backup volumes for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). Such large file systems are related to having a large amount of metadata to manage the file data. The effort of finding and navigating inside a file system of 1 terabyte is considerably higher than for a file system size of 10 GB. This study was intended to show how current file system types, like EXT3, XFS, and ReiserFS v3 behave with a file system of 1.6 TB in a multi processor environment on Linux on IBM System z.