One of the things you can do with reiserfs is put the journal onto a different device. Why this would be a good idea is not anywhere in the documentation that I can find, but you can. I also remember from a DBA of my aquaintance that it is a Very Good Idea to put your transaction-logs on different drive-spindles than your database. These two ideas go together, from the sounds of it.
mkreiserfs -j /dev/cciss/c0d0p5 --format 3.6 /dev/cciss/c0d1p1
That'll make the partition known as /dev/cciss/c0d0p5 the transaction-log for the partition at /dev/cciss/c0d1p1. The transaction-partition is a whopping 37MB. Note in the above example that the two /dev entries are for different physical devices. And in this case, they actually are.
The question has been raised about how reiserfs and nss handle 'very large directories'. I'd like to test that, but I don't really have a good test suite for it. The utility iozone is just for testing throughput, not for large directory sizes. This needs thought.
mkreiserfs -j /dev/cciss/c0d0p5 --format 3.6 /dev/cciss/c0d1p1
That'll make the partition known as /dev/cciss/c0d0p5 the transaction-log for the partition at /dev/cciss/c0d1p1. The transaction-partition is a whopping 37MB. Note in the above example that the two /dev entries are for different physical devices. And in this case, they actually are.
The question has been raised about how reiserfs and nss handle 'very large directories'. I'd like to test that, but I don't really have a good test suite for it. The utility iozone is just for testing throughput, not for large directory sizes. This needs thought.
Try fileopIt is part of the Iozone distro. It tests n^3 tree structures.