On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 22:45, Matteo Sisti Sette <matteosistisette@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

After a whole day spent trying to find the bottleneck that makes my patche so tremendosly slow to load in Pd under linux, I found out that if I load them from the native linux filesystem (an ext4 partition) they load about 30 times faster than when I load them from my NTFS partition which is where I usually keep all my data.

Outside Pd I had never noticed an abnormal slowness in reading data from that disk, and though I did expect NTFS to be slower in linux I am surprised the difference can be so huge. Is it so, or may there be some issue specific to Pd?

Yes, ext4 is relatively new, modern, and benchmarks prove it to be fast. NTFS is not so slow when used with Windows (7) but the linux ntfs-3g driver is a lazy one. The ntfs (no 3g) driver is faster but it's read only.

The other problem with ntfs-3g is that it seems to me that sometimes it corrupts the filesystem in a way that Windows (XP) has problems using it ("Delayed write failed" errors).

Also, some filesystems are less, some are more CPU-intensive so they work slower when the CPU is busy with other things, but in this case, I think, it's not about the CPU.

BTW, thanks for pulling my attention to this, now ext4 is mature enough that I migrate from xfs...!

Andras