[WBEL-users] Workstations pausing

[James Knowles]

> It's partly that I have an unusual event happening with the new server, 


You can put money on the filesystem not being the problem for the 
symptoms you described. Personally I'd focus on other avenues first.

> I've read that reiserfs is better/faster for the types of files we use.


Theory and practice are two separate issues, and benchmarks are to be 
read with a bucket of salt -- they don't (and can't) take everything 
into consideration. For example, on file servers the network will 
typically bottleneck long before the filesystem.

You'd have to benchmark from your own clients to determine whether there 
is any significant impact between filesystems. Most dramatic performance 
jumps that I've seen revolve around swapping out the 100Mb/s NICs and 
switches for 1Gb/S versions. Theoretically at 100Mb/S you could push up 
to 12.5MB/S across the wire, summed across all clients. That's not very 
fast. A typical soft RAID system should have no problem saturating that 
assuming large file transfers.