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Linux File System Shootout
IpSo_ writes "Finally an extensive, human readable Linux file system benchmark has been unleashed upon us. Originally posted on the Linux Kernel mailing list, using two of the most popular benchmarking tools available, it compares all the major file systems, including their different mount options. The results are surprising."
NTFS has been removed of the benchmark results because it was the best performer in every test!
There is have focus on throughput in these benchmarks. Reading and writing lots of data, seeking in files and reading data, etc.
Notably missing are more day-to-day useful operations such as the creation and deletion of lots of files, parallel action on many open files,
lots of files in a directory, etc.
When I want to select a filesystem, I do not want to know how fast it can read a 3GB file sequentially. I want to know how well it performs on a fileserver, mailserver etc.
best: jfs
worst: ext3_journal
bonnie++ benchmark
best: ext2
worst: reiser4/reiser4_extents, ext3_ordered/ext3_journal
From what I've seen poking around USEnet, JFS seems to have the too little, too late problem. I've never seen it pwn a benchmark like it did today though.
I'm a little confused-I have been told XFS is the best designed, highest performing file system, and I would hate to think SGI is getting into a lot of this crap with SCO for a relatively slow journaling file system...
The human readable result is you need to know what you want. There is no silver bullet.
It looks like xfs wipes the floor for all but temporary (loads of create/delete) file usage. Jfs looks like the best all-rounder. Reiser looks like something that can be tuned to the specific usage, but eats CPU for breakfast, lunch and dinner and EXT3 "surprise, surprise" sucks rocks. The other "surprise, surprise" is that EXT2 is still very good for many uses.
Frankly, I do not see anything new and fascinating in the results, but they are good to throw at people who keep asking me "why not EXT3" and "Why XFS or EXT2". Here is why!
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
IIRC, XFS is more about guaranteed performance under various stressful conditions than about getting the absolute peak speed in calm conditions.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
I'm not trying to be an asshole or a troll; just hear me out.
I love Reiser. I also love Gentoo and adore Debian. Myself and another guy, Joe, are the main "linux geeks" in our computer group (cugy.net). When it came time to decide what to support at our group, we had to choose RedHat.
If I'm in a message board or IRC channel, I need to know some things about the guy I'm helping. We reccomend RedHat because that is the biggest US company behind Linux (IBM and SUN notwithstanding). If I am teaching people about Linux, then it is to both our advantages to teach/learn about what we will see "in the field". Therefore, we only support RedHat.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, RedHat 9 and Severn do not allow the creation of Reiser by default. I could probably boot from a Gentoo disk and format a partition to Reiser, then install RedHat to it. But, by default, only ext* is allowed.
I love to do things that improve performance. I love testing new things on my laptop or on a offline box in our test lab. But unless RedHat offers it, it will remain in the shadows of the linux world, which is, in turn, in the shadows of the user enclave. Hell, of every important box on my network, they are either RedHat or Win2k.
More on topic, Joe got a lot of recognition when the "internet got a lot faster". Did he upgrade the firewall? Did he install another OC-3? Maybe he reconfigured services on the proxy?
Nope, he installed a hard drive, formatted it to Reiser, and moved the proxy cache to the reiser disk. I couldn't belive it. Just changing the filesystem caused an increase that was noticable across our network. At no cost!
Good work, Joe.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
type "linux reiserfs" when booting the installer, and you will have access to reiserfs during redhat install.
i've been using this method for ~2 years now.
Filesystem benchmarks can be remarkably inconsistent. These tables do not display average difference between runs. Usually this means that the methodology used to do the benchmarking is lax, and thus, untrustworthy.
For example, consider that harddrives do their own error correction. Depending on the location of marginal blocks on the media, different file systems can score dramatically for no other reason than the drive's re-mapping or error correction logic is kicking in at a bad point. Alignment of data can also be a factor in performace which depending on the formatting procedure may be completely random when compared to the file system sitting on top of it.
For these reasons and a host of others, it is not reliable to do filesystem performance comparison on a single machine.
Bottom line is that there is a good chance that these data are not fair representations of the relative merits of each filesystem.
I could go on... About the only thing it is missing is encryption. Of course it remains to be seen whether the port to Linux will be successful, and whether Novell has the sense to make it open source.