Reiser4 Benchmarks

unmadindu writes "Hans Reiser has benchmarked Reiser4 against ext3 and Reiserfs 3. Reiser4 turns out to be way faster than V3, and for ext3, why don't you check out the results yourself ? Hans Reiser states, "these benchmarks mean to me that our performance is now good enough to ship V4 to users", and he will be probably sending in a patch within the next couple of weeks to be included in the 2.6/2.5 kernel."

Comments

wait!

[BigBadDude]

hey, I can live with an unstable gnome or Kicq, but a beta filesystem?? no thanks dude!

Re:Reliability

[globalar]

Exactly. RAM, CPU, and storage space are ever increasing. Now we need better ways to organize data, access it, protect it, and back it up.

The fact of the matter is, it is easier to make a fast system than a stable, reliable one.

Re:Reiser4? Competition?

[jd]

Actually, OSS claims several of the best filing systems! :)

XFS is probably one of the fastest journalling filesystems out there, all-round, and probably offers the best competition to Reiser4. I'm actually surprised not to see some benchmarks against it, as XFS has gathered quite a following in places.

The port of the Plan9 filing system is said to be one of the fastest filing systems out there - enough so that it's a part of a Government research program called "Pink", run by some mad scientists at Los Alamos. Yes, that Los Alamos. Again, this would be an excellent FS to have some benchmarks against.

Last, but not least, Reiser4 didn't do spectacularly well against Ext3 in the benchmarks. I saw plenty of results both ways. Reading vs. Deleting, for example, shows a definite penalty whichever FS you choose, depending on the operations you're performing.

In the end, if you truly want the fastest system, you should format partitions according to the type of workload they'll be doing. You want fast deletes on a /tmp partition, for example, but you will likely care much more about reading times on your application binaries, and modification times on your data files.

(Unless you're using the suspend patch a lot, you probably won't want journalling on the /tmp partition, either.)

A truly optimized system, therefore, isn't about picking your "one true love" of the filesystems. It's about deciding what criteria apply, and then looking to see what filesystem best meets that criteria.

A mixed-fs machine should be capable of out-performing ANY homogenous-fs machine, no matter what fs the homogenous-fs machine has picked, because a homogenous system will always be a compromise. A mixed-fs system need compromise nothing. (Other than your sanity. Which, being a geek, is just a hinderence anyway.)