[nylug-talk] Filesystems that Support Transparent Compression?

[Yusuke Shinyama]

Hello,

Today I was asked if we can use any filesystem on Linux that
supports transparent compression. Because we're trying to handle
hunderds of gigabytes of XML data that can be compressed very well
(about 80-90% size reduction), we could save a lot of disk space
by using such a filesystem.

I found there is a patch for ext2, but this looks kinda outdated
and not very reliable. I've also read ReiserFS4 and ZFS supports
compression. But I'm not sure if I can go with Reiser4 either...
ZFS is not ported to Linux yet. Does anyone have any experience of
this? Is there any other option? We do care the reliability and
stability of software, but the speed is not a big issue.

Personally I think application-level compression is still better
choice. Then I would be interested in there's any wrapper or
library that facilitate this sort of integration.

Thanks,
Yusuke