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Journalling File System Comparison

Posted by timothy on from the which-does-what-how-fast dept.

Ithika writes "Justin Piszcz recently did an analysis of some common journaling file systems over at Linux Gazette. Due to the Gazette's ridiculous restrictions on image filesize all of the graphs are pretty much illegible, however. You can see the article as the author originally intended here."

3 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Reiser4, and why Ext2 is there by MBCook · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I've seen these kind of things before, but what I'd really like to see is Reiser 4. While I know it's not released yet, you can download the beta and I'd like to see how it performs compared to other filesystems.

    Otherwise, an interesting article.

    And for the complainers who say "Why include ext2, everyone should use a journaling filesystem", there are two reasons. First is that ext2 is a MAJOR STANDARD that was what everyone used for years and years. The second is that ext2 is still usefull. For a temporary filesystem (like /tmp or some temporary RAM disk with unimportant contents) ext2 is often very fast because it lacks all the journaling stuff which is unimportant for a temporary filesystem.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  2. It'd be cool by dtfinch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If there was a spreadsheet to go with that. One could normalize the results and weight each benchmark according to their performance needs. And there are differences between the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels' IO handling that could make an fs perform better on one kernel than the other.

    But since he's done this all for free, all I can say is thanks.

  3. FS corruption by ReyTFox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One test that wasn't in the article was a reliability test - i.e. if something bad happens, how much is lost? Or just as importantly, can you guarantee the FS will work as long as the storage device does?

    I've noticed that many people seem to have a bias against ReiserFS for being a less stable FS. There is some truth to that, I suppose, since it's newer, but I've poked around google for hard facts, and couldn't really find any evidence from the past 1 to 1-1/2 years of particular problems with *any* of the major filesystems. All I came up with were anecdotes, and not only that: There were just about as many with horror stories about ext2 and ext3 as with Reiser!!!

    So I wouldn't worry about corruption unless it's already happened to you; experience is the best teacher :P