There's so much that can go wrong setting up a Linux server that it's impossible to give much advice with something like this.
I guess the general stuff is: the easy default partitioning setup you get from a Linux distro is total bs, you need more RAM than you think you do, the way you're serving files or accessing the system (NFS!) has plenty of ways to screw things up as well, and tens or hundreds of millions of files is not any filesystem's ideal use case. The classic IRIX workload would be guaranteed-rate streaming of large media files, and the Linux port of the filesystem obviously inherited a lot of that system's traits (without the GRIO).
XFS has received some very serious performance improvements in the past couple of years to address indexing, large volumes of metadata, and so on, so that'd be one very relevant thing. Dave Chinner's talks are worth the time to watch if you're interested. You would be giving bad advice if you steered people one way or the other with regard to filesystems based on a seven-year old project (unless you've refreshed that system much more recently, of course).
> XFS has received some very serious performance improvements in the past couple of years to address indexing, large volumes of metadata, and so on, so that'd be one very relevant thing.
That's probably the difference right there. Thanks for pointing that out.
I guess the general stuff is: the easy default partitioning setup you get from a Linux distro is total bs, you need more RAM than you think you do, the way you're serving files or accessing the system (NFS!) has plenty of ways to screw things up as well, and tens or hundreds of millions of files is not any filesystem's ideal use case. The classic IRIX workload would be guaranteed-rate streaming of large media files, and the Linux port of the filesystem obviously inherited a lot of that system's traits (without the GRIO).
XFS has received some very serious performance improvements in the past couple of years to address indexing, large volumes of metadata, and so on, so that'd be one very relevant thing. Dave Chinner's talks are worth the time to watch if you're interested. You would be giving bad advice if you steered people one way or the other with regard to filesystems based on a seven-year old project (unless you've refreshed that system much more recently, of course).