The MacOSX 10.2.2 update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications and technologies: Address Book, iChat, IP Firewall, Mail, Print Center, Rendezvous, Sherlock and Windows file service discovery. It also provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS – not to be confused with IBM’s JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems. Journaling can also be turned on via the command line.
Mac OS X 10.2.2 Released
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It seem to have worked fine.
how is the filesystem performance with journaling turned on?
how is the filesystem performance with journaling turned on?
I’d tell you if I could figure out how to turn it on. All the release notes have to say on the issue is:
Provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems.
Expectedly there’s no such option in the workstation version, and no options documented in the tunefs(8) manual page. Perhaps it’s an option that needs to be passed to the HFS+ filesystem driver when the filesystem is mounted.
So if anyone here figures out how to turn on journaling, instructions would be much appreciated
I did not turn it on. I feel that it is not the right time to enable journal yet. If it was, Apple would have enable that feature on the DiskUtility for the plain OSX too. I prefer not to mess around too much with the Cube. I already had the DAVE networking addon installed there from before, and now that it doesn’t work with OSX 10.2 it is a pain in the butt to get it uninstalled.
Information here:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44782&cid=4646272
and here:
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?
sid=02/11/11/224213&op=Reply&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pi d=12
diskutil enableJournal /
sudo diskutil enableJournal /
What if you have more than one partitions on the machine? Will it still work with the exact same command line?
yeah it does, just put the partition path in and it should work fine.
Having found that 10.2 solved none of my complaints about OS X, does this update offer any other changes that anyone is aware of?
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8848
ok, I got it working.
I just rebooted. Performance with journaling ON, seems to be slow. It took more time for the machine to boot up and opening directories with Finder it seems to take longer! 😮
I will disable the thing.
No major change I can notice on my Powerbook. I haven’t really done much to test it out yet either. Seems about the same for general usuage.
If you need to disable… LOL
sudo diskutil disableJournal /
First, thanks to everyone for the information on how to enable journaling. Where’d you find that, anyway?
I’m also noticing a definate across-the-board performance decrease with journaling enabled. This just brings to mind why Apple is persisting with HFS instead of having Dominic Giampaolo design a completely new filesystem.
After Mac OS X 10 and Mac OS X 10.1, I’m not going to be suckered into spending another $80-$100 for the latest slow iteration. I don’t care if OS X is the wave of the future, I’m sticking with OS 9.2.2 where I can still run WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac and have those neat Kaleidescope themes. I don’t care what Mac Home or Mac World or Mac Universe or Mac Cosmos say!
I found out from a mac board a while ago. http://www.macosx.com/forums/.
if you type ‘diskutil’ in the terminal all the options are there you can use.
I assume this is a transition step to a new journaling system. I’m guessing they want to wait for a full transition elimination MacOS9 completely before rehauling the entire thing 100%. Just a guess.
I think things are a bit snappier. Without having turned journaling on, that is. I need to understand that better before I try using it. What are the advantages?
Apple really isn’t that afraid of breaking compatibility. They’ve moved to an entirely different platform (PPC) and an entirely different core, among other things. But while even Microsoft has managed to move to a different filesystem, Apple has still clung to HFS!
What operations are you noticing are slower with journaling
enabled?
>What operations are you noticing are slower with journaling enabled?
For me the system came back up a bit slower than usual and Finder was taking its time to open the /Applications/Utilities folder and other folders that had more than 20-30 files in it. Cube G4 450 Mhz, 448 MB SDRAM here.
Enabling jouraling will decrease your system performance by 15-20%. Apple is only recommending this for their servers.
Perhaps in future releases we will see better preformance. Mac OS X gets better every release.
i was very happy to see that the ibook spanning hack did not go bye bye with 10.2.2. only a matter of time perhaps.
got a link for more information on this? Sounds like somethin i could use.
Well, we certainly don’t need any more slow downs on
our Macs, that’s for sure 🙂
http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html
Heya there,
Is the slow performance on Dock opening and Finder window navigation/viewing a constant thing, or does it just happen the first time through?
Thanks,
‘Rithm
“Apple really isn’t that afraid of breaking compatibility. They’ve moved to an entirely different platform (PPC) and an entirely different core, among other things. But while even Microsoft has managed to move to a different filesystem, Apple has still clung to HFS!”
Well, in making the move to PPC, they had an emulation layer that ran old software very well.
In transitioning to OSX, they have Classic, which runs most old software reasonsably well.
And they introduced an update to HFS years ago (I’m stumped as to when they added it) called HFS+ which is a far superior file system.
Its a good FS, not the best, but still good.
” And they introduced an update to HFS years ago (I’m stumped as to when they added it) called HFS+ which is a far superior file system.”
They added it with OS 8.1 around the time the iMac first came out. That means all “modern” Macs use it.
HFS+ isn’t a journaling file system. This is more of a cheap hack to make it one, that’s why it’s slower.
Question: when you enable this does it have to do any conversion AKA Fat32 -> NTFS or is it a simple command and reboot?
Every other journaling filesystem gives IMPROVED performance but theirs is slower. I was thrilled when I heard that Apple was going Unix but they have a long way to go. I still maintain that they should have bought Be back in the day and built on that instead
doesn’t OS X support UFS? why doesn’t apple make a nice little HFS+ to UFS conversion tool, ala MSes FAT->FAT32 conversion tool
granted legacy MacOS apps will have problems with case sensitivity…
but since UFS uses soft updates, journalling isn’t necessary
i don’t quite understand what apple is doing with this
> HFS+ isn’t a journaling file system. This is more of a >
> cheap hack to make it one, that’s why it’s slower.
>
No, actually that’s wrong. 10.2.2 implement a block
level journal at the VFS level and HFS+ has been modified
to make use of it to record meta-data changes. It’s as
real as it gets for journaling.
> Question: when you enable this does it have to do any
> conversion AKA Fat32 -> NTFS or is it a simple command
> and reboot?
>
You can enable or disable journaling on a volume on the
fly once you’re running 10.2.2. Just install the update, reboot and then you enable/disable it at will.
Also, the performance “hit” that everyone is concerned about
affects operations like a finder copy or installing a
software package. Read-type operations (browsing files,
etc) are completely unaffected by journaling. Doing
large amounts of i/o is also largely unaffected (maybe
1-2% worse). Compiling large bodies of code sees no
difference whatsoever in performance. The worst case
is deleting a large hierarchy in the shell. At the Finder
level I doubt if anyone could even reliably tell the
difference between a journaled or non-journaled system.
It is a command, and it doesn’t ask you to reboot. 😮
It seems to be “on top” of the existing filesystem, not integrated into it.
“Every other journaling filesystem gives IMPROVED performance”
Not really, a journaling filesystem is typically slower(except on multiple platters or using an NVRAM journal).
Those who still think journaling filesystems are the magic bullet for everything should read http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/g…
I think the word you are looking for is silver bullet…
but since UFS uses soft updates, journalling isn’t necessary
OS X doesn’t support soft updates… yet
The UFS implementation in 10.2 has improved over 10.1 but is still sub-par performance-wise.
Not really, a journaling filesystem is typically slower(except on multiple platters or using an NVRAM journal).
I think the issue is that HFS+ just has bad performance in general, and certainly wasn’t designed with a BSD VFS in mind.
1) Journaling makes a FS slower, and I’m really astonished that we’re still discussing it. (Sure, the real problem lies on mechanical hard drives, but that’s not the point)
2) What makes journaling shines is the peace of mind it gives to you. With those thousands-of-gigabytes hard drives, it’s not an option, even on home systems, waiting a day for fsck’ing.
3) Why people are whining about “jHFS+”? Linux’ ext3 is a journaling layer over ext2 and it works beautifully. (Sure, Giampaolo is a great FS designer and won’t let Apple mess with it 🙂
//Enabling jouraling will decrease your system performance by 15-20%. Apple is only recommending this for their servers. //
Uh … why the high heck would I want to decrease system performance by 20% ON MY FREAKIN’ SERVER, which has 10x the disk I/O of a workstation??!??!
Apple in the server space … what a joke.
It will slow down the file system performance by up to the 15-20% noted. That said, not all of us have even noticed a difference in speed with it turned on. A few forums even have people who have done disk benchmarking and show no difference.
YMMV
OS X Server has a button in Disk Utility to turn journaling on or off, no command line needed.
Get postmark and compile it and run it (it compiles on pretty much anything). Netapp wrote it and it’s OS-agnostic.
Compare performance before/after journaling.
Parameters: Type exactly the following:
set number 10000
set transactions 10000
set subdirectories 5
set size 500 100000
run
I test various enterprise journaling filesystems on a daily basis and I love postmark for this…
Journaling, if implemented correctly, does not hurt performance too much and in some cases greatly increases performance.
There are other aspects in the design of an advanced filesystem of course (i.e. blocks vs. extents) and I hope we’ll see Apple use something decent sometime.
D
I have a Pismo 400 and I turned on Journaling last night. I’m acutely aware of the performance issues in OS X and I have to say I haven’t noticed any perceptible difference except possibly in one instance. I moved a large number of files in the finder in to a folder and it seemed to take a long time. I’ve never noticed this before but if that’s the performance hit then it’s worth it for me to have journaling on. I probably should have waited to turn journaling on to see if all the bugs were worked out but sometimes my battery slides out of place and the computer shuts off while commuting to from work. Oh, and I have almost no impulse control.
>I think the word you are looking for is silver bullet…
Am I really that old, I havent seen that article in nearly 20 years. (I think it was published in 1984)
… regarding the trouble you’re having with Dave, you should try this:
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=16205&db=mac
this saved me when I updated to 10.2 with Dave, cleaned my system right out in a couple of seconds when I spent over an hour trying to locate the different files Dave installed.
Versiontracker is your friend ;o)
Rayiner Hashem said: “Apple really isn’t that afraid of breaking compatibility.They’ve moved to an entirely different platform (PPC) and an entirely different core, among other things.
It’s funny that you say this, as neither broke the operating system’s compatibility.
That is of course unless you’re just a forum troll bent on tarnishing Apple’s reputation.
I monitor these forums quite often and have been keeping tabs on the types of feedback each person makes. I’ve found that the vast majority of your posts have an anti Apple slant to them. (I didn’t notice this until someone else made the observation)
“While even Microsoft has managed to move to a different filesystem, Apple has still clung to HFS!”
Apple is NOT using HFS, but rather… HFS+ as its default file system (although many others are supported.)
HFS is support is only provided for compatibility and users are encouraged to use HFS+ for new volumes.
The HFS+ volume format, unlike the HFS volume format, provides storage for Unix-style meta-data (such as owner and mode bits). This made it a lot easier to enable the use of HFS+ in the Darwin environment though some incompatibilities still exist.
With HFS+, the case of file names is remembered, but access to file names with varying case will yield the same file, and file names which vary only in case aren’t allowed in any given directory. Typical Unix filesystems are, in contrast, case sensitive. But so far these differences have been “trivial” to fix.
Another obvious problem is the different path separators between HFS+ (colon, ‘:’) and UFS (slash, ‘/’). This also means that HFS+ file names may contain the slash character and not colons, while the opposite is true for UFS file names. However, this, too, has been addressed.
HFS+ lacks support in the volume format for hard links, a standard feature of UFS. Meanwhile, UFS doesn’t support file IDs, which is a feature of HFS+. File IDs are persistent handles to a file, and can be used to access a file in a manner similar to which one uses paths in Unix. Both problems have been, and continue to be, addressed.
One of the biggest problems is the lack of complex file support in most Unix filesystems. HFS+ allows a file to have multiple data streams: one, the data fork, contains the actual file data, and another, the resource fork contains additional resource data.
Maybe you’ll think next time before you troll.
Somebody’s watching you now.
So far I’ve turned on journaling and can’t really see much of a difference in disk access; although I know it’s there and anyone that complains about it needs to really stop and think. Of COURSE a journaled FS will be a little slower. Instead of just writting/erasing data to the disk, you’re doing that and keeping track of what you’ve done. That’s already more read/write per file operation. Anyone that expects a journaled FS to be faster than a non journaled one, journaling being the only difference is just being foolish. I mean look at BeOS. Lovely OS and file system, but try moving around a lot of small files. It’s a lower slower than it’d be in another non-journaled OS.
//Uh … why the high heck would I want to decrease system //performance by 20% ON MY FREAKIN’ SERVER, which has 10x the //disk I/O of a workstation??!??!
Because those of us who run real servers worry more about downtime and data corruption than we do a mere 10% decrease on write performance. If your server goes down would you rather bring it back up immediately, or would your rather fsck for an hour to bring 400GB of data from the dead?
//Apple in the server space … what a joke.
This shows they are serious about the server space. Nobody ever told you to turn it on for your desktop. Just cause you can doesn’t mean you should, in all cases.
Hey Mickey, if anyone is trolling, it’s you. We know Rayiner here – who are you?
At any rate, OS X has really turned out to be a work in progress. At first I realized I was, in essence, beta testing for Apple until 10.2. Now they’re rolling out other aspects of the new OS. It’s great, but Apple has got to speed things up if they’re going to have stuff like journaling. Well, lol, they need to speed things up anyway.
Both PPC and OS X break compatibility in the same way a new filesystem would break compatibility. You format your drive with a new filesystem, old MacOSs won’t be able to read it. You move an app to PPC or OS X, and old versions of the OS won’t be able to run it. Moving to a new filesystem breaks certain applications that assume too much about the system, just like moving to PPC or OS X breaks certain applications that assume too much about the system. Moving to a new filesystem is comparatively painless. If Apple isn’t afraid to move to a totally different processor architecture, or to a totally new OS core, why are they afraid to get rid of HFS?
PS> HFS+ is just a kludge on top of HFS. It extends certain structures to gain small advances. It’s little better than say moving from fat16 to fat32. HFS needs to be replaced *entirely* It’s just a plain weird filesystem. Read Domonic Giampalo’s book about filesystems, where he goes into some detail about HFS.
“Hey Mickey, if anyone is trolling, it’s you. We know Rayiner here – who are you?”
I’m troling because I point out Rayiner Hashem’s famable comment and because you don’t know me? That sounds logical
“At any rate, OS X has really turned out to be a work in progress.”
Seeing as though no operating system ever reaches “finished” status, the same can be said of all operating systems. Thankfully, OS X is a very refined advanced Operating system that raises the bar significantly for all OSes.
“At first I realized I was, in essence, beta testing for Apple until 10.2.
Why were you running a beta. Apple has had a very refined OS since its release. Its simply gotten better and better with each update.
“Now they’re rolling out other aspects of the new OS.”
As they always have been.
“It’s great, but Apple has got to speed things up if they’re going to have stuff like journaling.”
I don’t know why you imply that there is a sence of urgency here. Apple’s computers are plenty-fast for journaling. Besides, It’s not as if Apple is standing still, But then again, something tells me that your motives my be not unlike those of Mr. Hashem.
“Well, lol, they need to speed things up anyway.”
You mean the way that they have been, are doing, and will continue to do?
can some one explaing what this journaling really is? im new to all this unix things….
Mickey, I’m not going to start a flame war. What I meant was that Rayiner is well known here and he is not a troll. Rayiner does not even like icons. We know where he is coming from when he posts. Your post about him was a troll. What are you, the Mac Police?
I’ve been using Apple computers since the IIe came out and continue to use them. I did use the beta of OS X, but what I meant was that 10.0 – 10.5.1 was still not ready for prime time. In fact, when I was younger, I was an Apple zealot. I found, in time, that being a zealot is not as much fun as seeing things as they are (in Apple’s case) and seeing things as they are regarding all other OSes. Believe me, it’s much more fun this way.
> can some one explaing what this journaling really is? im new to all this unix things….
Journaling is a term describing a file system that allows the file system driver to store some bookkeeping information so that if a write is interrupted, data is not lost.
HFS+, yes it is a kludge, but it’s unfortunately neccessary at the moment. The reason being that without it Carbon cannot function; carbon apps need resource forks, and standard UFS (which I want to use instead) doesn’t support it. Therefore, until Adobe et al get thier apps ported to Cocoa or something like a carbon-to-cocoa migration tool becomes reality, a new FS aint gonna happen. Too bad too.
I HATE carbon!
UFS (hopefully with SoftUpdates or even something better and different by Dominic) will become standard once we move to cocoa.
Give it a few years, 2-3 max I’d say.
Of course, this is one of the reasons that stops many people from getting a Mac. Remember the original transition from 680×0 to PowerPC? Took a while to convert everything to native format, even the OS and ROM were not all native.
The current situation is actually not as bad.
D
Here’s an excellent summary of the purpose for journaling and the differences between enabling it on Mac OS X Server and client.
http://www.workingmac.com/inetd/184.wm