Linux.com

You are EXACLTY correct in your assessment of RedHat's investment in ext3. This is a matter of business. It has NOTHING to do with performance or stability. Forget about all the hype you see in print and talk to people that have actually used Reiser in a production enironment. In fact, having lots of experience with both etx3 and Reiser, I can say without hesitation that unless you need the features that are unique to ext3, there is no reason not to use Reiser. It's *much* faster (especially if you have directories that contain 100K plus files as I do), and it's been ROCK SOLID on distros that support it (such as SuSE and Gentoo). I've used it for three plus years on SuSE and never had a glitch - on servers that get over 2 million hits/day. By the way, in my case, the absence of support for Reiser was the single prevailing factor in our decision not to use RedHat's Enterprise product. Etx3 was dog slow on any directory with more than a few thousand files. We installed Reiser and the difference was night and day. We actually purchased the RedHat Enterprise Server product but subsequently had to return it because RedHat refused to support Reiser - even though it was included in their commercial distro. We went with SuSE Pro instead. It cost all of $70. Super fast. Never been down. Best decision we ever made. Take it for what you want. These are just the facts as we know them.

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