Because XFS is BETTER (Re: opinion on XFS)

[Mark Hahn]

> That's really an advantage. Space utilization is in fact quite important
> for contemporary applications on UNIX. Especially since we tend to have
> so many small files such as sources, etc. nowadays. The savings can be 
> significant.

odd how; I would state the exact opposite: space utilization is becoming
pointless because disk is embarassingly cheap, and files are getting
bigger.  I also do not see any non-mistake large directories (where 
large means over say, 4k files.)  at least not in the scientific 
computing arena - mail and news servers are naturally quite a lot 
different in how they use files.

do me, if your batch system is generating tens of thousands of result
files, you should probably consider making your batch infrastructure 
a little smarter - for instance, a perl master script to manage those jobs,
and coalesce the data.

> It's very easy to crash a node with a suitable code, so I shouldn't have to 
> re-install it or manually fsck it every time it fails to reboot after such a 
> crash...

similarly, this statement makes no sense to me either: why are your nodes
crashing?  shouldn't you try fixing your nodes so they don't crash?
it is VERY MUCH not the norm for linux nodes to crash, so you are clearly
doing something wrong.