Huge Increase for Ext2/Ext3 Performance

pixelbeat writes "Grigory Orlov origonally implemented this new allocator for FreeBSD, and it's been merged in 2.5.46 and the first benchmarks are in: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=103 650970512510&w=2 In summary: 13% increase on unpacking a kernel tarball 43% increase on uncached kernel tree traversal 48% increase on cached kernel tree traversal 170%increase on deleting kernel tree"

Comments

So...

[Spokehedz]

What does this translate into real-world usage? Or am I just another stupid Micro-Serf who doesn't get that _every_ percentage increase is an increase to write to Slashdot about.

Re:So...

[psavo]

What does this translate into real-world usage? Or am I just another stupid Micro-Serf who doesn't get that _every_ percentage increase is an increase to write to Slashdot about.

Do I have to explain everything?
Simple. MOER FERKIN' PR0N, FESTER, FESTER!!!

Re:So...

[Spokehedz]

*LAUGHING* How did that get a +2 score? Aww, who cares--its Slashdot. News for Neanderthals. Stuff that is inconsequential. right?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> *LAUGHING* How did that get a +2 score?

If a user has lots of karma, they can post at 2, wheras most people post at 1.

We special high-karma folks have privledges...

Re:So...

[Spokehedz]

Quote:
We special high-karma folks have privledges...

Said the AC from Oblivion...

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even a 13% improvement is nice. It makes the fast system even faster...

>>>Or am I just another stupid Micro-Serf who doesn't get that _every_ percentage increase is an increase to write to Slashdot about.

No, you're just a micro-serf who's trying to antagonize people into an argument, as if that was original....

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking newbie. On AOL, the corrct term is LOL, not *laughing*. If you're going to play the role of a flaming gay hairdresser with an AOL account, at least get the lingo right.

EVERYONE who says LOL or ROTFLMAO is a flaming gay AOL hairdresser. And if you'd been around you'd know that. So, you must be a newbie.

Re:So...

[Spokehedz]

No, I asked a valid question, and then I simply short-cut what everyone would say about me when anyone asks why Linux does anything it does. Which is "Because it can."

This was not for a flame--I honestly want to know if it is a huge increase, or a small increase. I'm planning on switching as soon as I get a new CDRW to burn the ISO's.

Whatever. I'll get the "+1 Flamebait" and I'll live with it.

Re:So...

[Spokehedz]

Riiiight.

Re:So...

[ivan256]

I honestly want to know if it is a huge increase, or a small increase.

As in all things benchmarking related, the answer is: It depends. This will be significant for certain uses of your system, but unimportant for others. If you've got a very busy file server, a news server, or a build machine where you do alot of compilation, this will be very significant. For other tasks you might not even notice.

This is a kernel change, so there won't be any ISOs. Why not just try it now?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

And all users have the option of posting as AC if they want. I just don't care enough about this offtopic conversation to post with my normal name...

So gee whiz, what's with the flames?

Re:So...

[psavo]

it depends largely on what you do. If you handle many small files a lot, this would be an imporvement. For bigger files it's not yet known. In theory it could speed up an httpd when clients access lots of different static html files. Also nntpd (news) would be afected. maildir / imap servers could benefit too.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

funny, does the +1 bonus work even on AC post?

Re:So...

[Spokehedz]

Well, as a Micro-serf... I don't recompile the Kernel too often. Nor do I compile much sourcecode on my system.

And why don't I try the new kernel?

*Puts on flame-proof armor*

Because I'm still running WindowsXP.

I'd like to switch--I really would. I can't burn the ISO's of the CD's because my burner won't work, and I can't buy the boxed set 'cause I'm broke.

I'm gonna buy the 52x24x52 burner next pay. But until then, I'm stuck in Windows.

Re:So...

[psavo]

borrow a debian cd. if it's new enough (2.0 or something around there), it'll update itself all the way up. (you need a broadband connection though). Debian is also installable from 2 floppies (network install grabs everything from net). I believe mandrake & Redhat have those too.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially considering we were saying things like LOL before AOL even existed :P

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which just goes to prove the poster's point, you pinko flaming-gay hairdresser, you. You look so butch it that sparkle top.

Re:So...

[ivan256]

I'm assuming you have a fast net connection. If you don't, please disregard...

Download the debian boot-floppies. You can do a full net instalation, and you'll only install what you need instead of downloading the entire contents of some distro's ISOs.

If you're not afraid of trying a development kernel with a beta filesystem patch, then the debian installation process should be simple.

Seriously, though. It looks like this new filesystem patch isn't quite ready. They're still finding leaked blocks and other corruption. You should run a "stable" kernel on your primary box, or you should do frequent backups! My primary workstation is running 2.4.17 (Hasn't had any downtime since 2.4.17 was released, so I haven't upgraded.), and I reserve the 2.5 series kernels for the rack of test machines behind me. If they break it's OK, but if I loose my emacs session I get seriously pissed off.

-- No need for flameproof armor. My home box runs windows most of the time. I hack Linux all day at work, so I want to use my home box for gaming. No better OS for that right now than windows. --

Re:So...

[cornice]

I don't know much about the patch but if I can get similar results then this is huge. Think about the things that you do on your computer that cause you to wait. I bet most of them are associated with disk IO eg booting, loading Word, Mozilla, etc. Now imagine these things taking significantly less time - without a hardware upgrade. Sounds good to me. I'm just waiting to the YMMV disclaimer...

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm checking Google right now, and it appears that the earliest reference to LOL was Right here. That's May 8th, 1989. The first reference to America Online was Sept. 14th, 1989. So LOL does indeed predate America Online.

However, it is still entirely true that LOL is very very gay.

Re:So...

[ActiveSX]

Whatever. I'll get the "+1 Flamebait" and I'll live with it.

Yeah, I don't think anybody would object to getting their comment modded up, but flamebait is a -1. Slashdot would be a much different beast if it was +1, methinks.

Re:So...

[Spokehedz]

This is what I've been looking for--the net install disks. Thank you.

However, the lack of a CD-burner problem still remains; I have a 60 GB RAID-0 formatted as NTFS that I wish to turn into a disk that I can use in Linux. And AFAIK, there isn't anything to convert NTFS to EXT2/3, and I need some of those files (drivers, mp3/OGG, pictures (vacation, not porn), etc.) off of it.

I know I can read the NTFS disk, but that doesn't help me at all as I want to actually use the disk as a read/writeable disk--not a read-only disc.

So you see, the CD-Burner wasn't just for the ISO's (I didn't know about the net install at the time) to be burned. It was to preserve my files on the migration over to the new system.

But thank you for the honest and informative reply to my questions, even when they were OT.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about XP, but I know in windows 2000, you can dynamically convert an NTFS partition to a "dynamic volume" or whatever they call it, and then back. You can do it in the disk manager utility. I'm pretty sure that you can resize your NTFS volume if you convert it first, and then switch it back to a regular style partition so you can mount it from linux. (Still read-only, but you'll have empty space for your ext2/3 partition).

Wow...

[avalys]

Who let that mess slip through?

Windows/Mac

[dalutong]

Since this is just a test of unpacking and deleting lots of files... couldn't one do this test in Windows/Mac OSX to see how their file systems match up.

Does anyone have any benchmarks comparing them?

lots-a- small files

[drDugan]

typically I don't deal with thousands of small files at once.

I wonder how much better it does it do on the 650 MB video files I push around.

Re:lots-a- small files

[benjamindees]

This would be more of a test of your hard drive than the filesystem. If you just need to manipulate one big file, you don't really need a filesystem, then, do you?

Re:lots-a- small files

[cookd]

Any well-written filesystem will push your video files around at about the same speed: the speed of your hard disk drive (assuming the files aren't too fragmented, which I suppose has some bearing on the filesystem). But in other tests, different filesystems make a huge difference.

After uncompressing and compiling a tarball, I am always given a lovely opportunity to ponder the mysteries of the universe as the rm -r latest-extracted-tarball command runs. For some reason, the delete of a tree seems to go really slowly on both FreeBSD and Linux, while the same operation seems to be a lot faster under Windows (no benchmarks here, just vague generalizations).

So this could make a real difference in real-life scenarios. The benchmarks listed are some of the more challenging performance hurdles for filesystem designers. If this doesn't hurt fragmentation rates, this sounds like a win-win.

Re:lots-a- small files

[0x0d0a]

(/me interested) You're using what filesystems here on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows?

Having any performance area in which Windows beats Linux is a black eye...:-)

Re:lots-a- small files

[cookd]

Windows -- both NTFS and FAT seem to delete a tree much more quickly than FreeBSD's native format (UFS, no? I never actually pay attention when I'm setting things up, and I haven't had to install my BSD box for a long time...). I do most of my dev work on NTFS-based systems, and cleaning/clobbering the source trees gives me plenty of opportunity to get a feel for how quickly it can delete.

Softupdates helped BSD, but not as much as I was hoping.

I don't play around with Linux nearly as much as BSD and Windows. But because of my experiences with BSD, I tried a few experiments on a Linux box I had to mess around with (I'm pretty sure it was running ext2) and the results were comparable with FreeBSD's.

Like I said, these are vague generalizations. I never took two samples on the same hardware, never used a stopwatch. But extracting and then deleting the PHP tarball and its corresponding tree is much faster on my Windows XP box than on my FreeBSD box. YMMV : )

Re:lots-a- small files

[0x0d0a]

Hmm...

The problem here is that there are a lot of variables involved.

* The fullness of the partition is an issue.
* Whether the OS is using write caching is an issue
* Whether the drive is using write caching is an issue.
* The speed of the drive is an issue
* The location of the partition on the drive is an issue.

I haven't tried timed deletes, but FAT in general seems significantly slower than ext2/3. Could be just the fact that I usually use FAT on 9x, which has a lousy I/O subsystem. I don't really have any comparable boxes that have Windows and Linux on them to compare, though.

Oh, one other question -- are you mounting noatime? I always mount noatime (the constant bloddy disk accesses drive me mad otherwise...)

Re:lots-a- small files

[Anonymous Coward]

FAT/FAT32 is WAY slower than ext2. BSD is slower than ext2 ... everyone trashes ext2 for designing for speed rather robustness. Ext2 is possibly slower than newest versions of NTFS (but NTFS was a pig in NT4.0) but is much much much faster than fat32.

FreeBSD first, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

No surprise, it was done onf FreeBSD first.

I snicker and chuckle at the Linux zealots.

FreeBSD is for those who know and love Unix

Linux is for Microsoft zealots who have converted to being Linux zealots.

Re:FreeBSD first, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooops, almost forgot...

Signed,
drdink

Re:FreeBSD first, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooops, almost forgot...

Signed,
drdink

LEAVE SOME CORNEAS FOR THE REST OF US, MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!

christ. you really piss me off.

Re:FreeBSD first, of course.

[drdink]

Cute. Lame, but cute.

Re:FreeBSD first, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

:-)

Re:FreeBSD first, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost forgot!

Signed,
jjayson the Homosexual!!!

Re:FreeBSD first, of course.

[Nugget]

Linux is poo.

Re:FreeBSD first, of course. tsarkon says

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so fucking right on. Here here.

The Sanitations and Teh Futar3 of Slashdot.Tsarkon

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sanitations (Sung to the tune of "My Girl," )
"My Ass"

I've got indigestion
On a smelly day
When its brewing inside
I've got pain like a gay

Well, I guess you'll say
What can make me feel this way?
MY ASS. (Choral) My assss, My assss.
Talkin' 'bout MY ASS. (Choral) Oooooh.

I've got so much dysentery
No one envies me.
I've got a nastier rump roast
Than dogs with worms

Well, I guess you'll say
What can make me feel this way?
MY ASS. (Choral) My assss, My assss.
Talkin' 'bout MY ASS. (Choral) Oooooh.
Ooooh, Hoooo. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey.

I don't need no EX-LAX
Senna or a fleet
I've got all the diarrhea, baby,
One man can lay

Well, I guess you'll say
What can make me feel this way?
MY ASS. (My ass, my ass)
Talkin' 'bout my ass. (My ass)
Talkin' bout my ass.
I've got diarrhea after Imodium AD
With my ass.
I've even got a month of loose stools
With my ass.
Talkin' bout, talkin' bout my ass . .

170% increase on deleting kernel tree

[wcbarksdale]

Imagine how quickly you can rm -rf / now...

Re:170% increase on deleting kernel tree

[tim0thy]

Yeah, you can 'rm -rf /' a company's system 170% faster right after you get laid off!

The Future of Slashdot and FREEBSD tsarkon reports

[Anonymous Coward]

The Future of SLASHDOT.

2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts." or posts that contain any rational insight are modded "troll."

2002. CmdrTaco married to a human female, reports are that she does not have 46 chromosomes, however. Fent does display tendency to retardation.

2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.

2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God. (Taco suggested that in order to be "God," or his vision of God, Gates would have to be seen in a NAMBLA T-shirt. Luckily good taste prevails in favor of the old man image in glowing aura)

2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity, well, not sex with men virginity, that's long since gone, and not sex with anime blow up dolls, this time, real sex.

2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite
running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0Beta6 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."

2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.

2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms. FreeBSD users are glad the insanity is dying.

2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again, even with constant Viagra therapy, it took this long. He complains, I can be ready to go again in five minutes if I was looking at a nude man, to the dyslexic Fent.

2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.

2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again, this time plugging Fent in the ass for a more manlike feel.

2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place. FreeBSD 9 is delivered in perfect working order in a coherent superior, commercially viable and useable fashion with real documentation, the same practice followed since inception. Linux lunatics, after the death of Cox, are still trying to perfect the Trident driver while ignoring the existence of the GeForce 9. Netcraft dies along with all the surveys they held on Microsoft and Linux servers are lost as well.

2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.

2007. Box running FreeBSD for 6 years sets world record for Unix uptime on consumer hardware.

2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time without thinking of men. He has dawned on the extra sexual pick me up for his twisted mind, small children.

2010 Marcelo Tosatti finally releases a version of the 2.4 Linux Kernel that is useable 2.4.29-RC2099.alpha.stage.99 (not -STABLE!). Fuck you Marcelo, YOU SUCK as a MAINTAINER.

Is genital-too, I mean Gentoo fixed yet? Last time it made me perform all these stupid, fucking easily scriptable mindless tasks to get it installed, with everything installed perfectly the stupid thing didn't work. Death to OS X, death to lame Linux distributions, I want a COHERENT Linux distribution and FREEBSD or DIE, baby.

Re:The Future of Slashdot and FREEBSD tsarkon repo

[glenstar]

You are not very nice... funny, but not very nice... ;-)

You forgot one very import event: in 2008, the Gnu HURD will be in "beta".

Re:The Future of Slashdot and FREEBSD tsarkon repo

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahaha. hurd beta in 2008.

ehehehe. poor Hurd. its like Mach. good on paper, but...........

Re:FreeBSD first, of course. tsarkon reports

[Anonymous Coward]

if this is flamebait, prove it you fucking moderator. you fucking moderator pussy cunt. thats opinion, not flamebait, you fucking dumb cunt moderator. and its true, you fucking dumb cunt moderator.

This is just another example of spineless crap moderation here on /.

Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, SLASHDOT's editing/moderating [read: censoring] "community"(*) ALL AGREE on ONE THING:

CENSORSHIP WORKS!

(*)Note, the word community used often on Slashdot, this is referring to a proto communist commune.

So, you busy little plebian proletariats, get busy, you have some censoring to do! FUN! Do the bidding of your fat, undisciplined masters who never subject themselves to peer review!

Good job you little neo-commies. Don't want to hear the other side, shoot the fucker in the head as an ENEMY OF THE STATE [In this case anyone who seeks to improve the sad state of /.].

I have a Gun and the Constitution [Not the urinated-on pissed-on hacked fucked up one WashingTOON thinks exists, I mean the real one, with Jefferson and Madison at my side], please, give me an excuse to use them both.

A few haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe Moderators
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit moderator!
Try to suck less, please

The Humorless Moderator
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator!
Why do you hate me?

The Proletariat
Slashdotting Commie
Moderator fears new idea!
Censor him quickly

The reason China blocked Slashdot is that when Jiang Xemin saw at how good "The Editors" at Slashdot are at suppressing the community, he knew that if more of his party members saw this degree of suppressive efficacy, he would be deposed, for the good of the people, of course, in favor of Rob Malda as the all new supreme dictator and premier of China.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. - Sir Winston Churchill (Especially when your democratic peers twist democracy into a reason commit censorship, to squash dissenting or unpopular opinions, and refer to them as trolls, flaimbait overrated or offtopic when they aren't any of the said)

The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver. - Jay Leno.

The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government. (Death to those who defile the root documents of a free nation to make economic freedom Supercede Freedom! Freedom First! Free market Second!)

Occam's Razor "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" "Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora" "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" Translation: " "Simple explanations are preferred to complex ones" Modern fucking translation "JUST DO IT."

Reading Slashdot at anything above -1 is like trying to put a shit filter on your ass.

Get busy moderating this down, you little pack of obedient prefects of the corrupt state! You are the vanguards of purity, and dissent is not allowed!

HAIKUS
MODERATORS Crack smoke wafts though air - Dumb shit moderator - Try to suck less, please
KAZAA Fuck R I A A - Network sold behind their backs - Stupid fucking cunts
Haiku: to the Slashfags. Fuck slash editors - The cumlicking fags they are - I shit upon them
TACO pondering GOATSE: I stare at the goat - His huge gaping ass so wide - And I want to eat
Haiku: The ancient haiku: - Flame Taco and CowboyNeal - With lame poetry.
CowboyNeal A mountain of fat, - butt cheeks jiggling like Jello. - What an odd poll choice!
CmdrTaco Watching Pokemon - With cum stuck on his goatee. - Newbie loser scum.
Stinky Kathleen Fent Cockeater Taco, - Proposing to Fent online, - I fingered her too.
Rob Malda and Kathleen FentChubby breasts, fat ass - Distract us from Rob's boylust. - But they both suck cock!
Taco Tuesday: Too much mexican. - Angry poo, firey hot. - Where's my antacid?
CHOAD licking Taco: Malda in the dark - Swallowing choad for profit - He rips his anus
Fuck KATZ Katz is a Jew - michael is a Mormon - Or is it Timothy?
Martini Fuck off That is fucking good. - I nearly spilt martini - On my nice trousers.
Slap my Ham, rub it off, fuck Spank fast wank it hard - Jerk that dick to Pokemon - Party at Taco's
GOAT I just came again - looking at the goat-see man - more kleenex required
Cock BIRD The Dead Penis Bird - Nailed to the member always - Never falling off
BSD Stare into the night - Sun is setting on your sys - BSD *NOT* dead
Michael Michael User Simms - Sifting through all our comments - Censoring bastard
Klerk Trolltalk hard to read - Information desires - Wideness for us all
Cobalt Really tired now - Off to masturbate to sleep - See you at the day
Humorless Moderator Crack smoke wafts through air - Humorless moderator - Why do you hate me?

More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post . There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4.

"170% increase on deleting kernel tree"

[psyconaut]

Speed increase on rm -r /: 170%
Likelyhood of keeping your job after doing this: 0%
Seeing your boss's face when you tell him: priceless

-psyco

Re:"170% increase on deleting kernel tree"

[Hard_Code]

Is there any speed increase for the second run of rm -r / ?

Troll

[Gerry Gleason]

So, what you are saying is that the original comment was just a troll. If you don't use and are not interested in using Linux, then why are you commenting.

Since there are a large number of problems that are essentially disk bound, this is probably more important than an equal improvement in CPU speed.

Re:Troll

[ActiveSX]

No, he's saying that he's going to try Linux as soon as he gets a burner to make cds from a distro's ISOs.

Without reading about the original patch...

[0x0d0a]

...I strongly suspect that this allocater has both good cases and bad cases (particularly given how mature ext2 is).

I'm actually using it ATM, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does something nasty (like increase fragmentation under low-free-space conditions or something).