XFS and barriers

Lately at work, we’ve been trying to figure out what the deal with barriers are, either for XFS or EXT3, the two filesystems we like most. If you don’t know what barriers are, go and read a bit on the XFS FAQ. Short story, XFS comes with barriers enabled by default, EXT3 does not. Barriers make your system a lot more secure to data corruption, but it degrades performance a lot.