ext3 + db = slooooow

[Matthias Andree]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Greg Louis wrote:

> Shoulda thought of that long since :(  If I build that spamlist.db on a
> machine with an ext2 partition instead of my notebook's ext3, it takes
> about 3 minutes instead of thirteen, even though the CPU on that
> machine is 733MHz not 1100 and it has half the RAM of my notebook. 
> I've often heard that for some things journalling fs's really slow you
> down, but this is the first time I've been in such a situation.
> 
> I suspect I need to mount the ext3 partition for this job with
> different options from the default.  Will go read up on that again. 

Given a sufficiently large journal, try data=journal, because writing
into a data base conducts some synchronous operations. Note though
you'll have to use a recent 2.4 kernel version, because ext3 has
undergone substantial tuning since it was merged into the kernel.

> Very sorry for all the wasted time (and rather relieved that it's not
> really an intrinsic bogofilter problem).

The interesting bit is still why it gets so *awfully* slow. I mean, you
machines are faster CPU-wise than mine, and RAM is no issue on either,
and I am using ext3.