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Linux Filesystems Benchmarked

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the some-my-fs-is-more-fast dept.

smatt-man writes "Over at Linux Gazette they ran some tests on popular Linux filesystems (ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, xfs) and the results may surprise you."

9 of 468 comments (clear)

  1. 'Tis a dupe by Quattro+Vezina · · Score: 5, Informative

    The original article

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  2. Re:Not a clear winner by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not quite what I got from it. Ext2 was certainly faster for a lot of operations, but is, of course, not journalled. XFS and JFS were fast, but most importantly, when it came to large files, these two tended to really take the lead. XFS was particularly good at handling large files. Overall Ext3 was disappointingly slow surprisingly often.

    Jedidiah.

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  3. Re:Not a clear winner by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ext3 met Dr. Tweedie's engineering goals. The idea was to develop a journaling file system which was seamlessly compatible with Ext2. Ext3 is really an engineering marvel. You can instantly convert it back and forth between Ext2 an Ext3.

    Ext3 provides a safe low-pain entry into the world of journaled file systems. No need to re-partition or reformat. It offers reasonably good performance plus the benefits of journalling.

  4. Re:Slightly OT by Malc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Obviously (as you point out) a journallying filesystem is what you need. I went for Ext3 on my Debian servers. I/O throughput wasn't so important. The good thing about Ext3 is its backwards-compatibility with Ext2. If there's a problem and you don't have all the kernel modules or tools then you're still pretty much guarranteed access to the file system by mounting it as Ext2 as support for that system is almost universal under Linux.

  5. ext3 slowness by ReignStorm · · Score: 5, Informative
    from Linux ext3 FAQ
    Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?
    Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it: In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone. Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.
  6. Re:Slightly OT by Tet · · Score: 5, Informative
    But I thought Ext3 will only journal metadata

    No, in fact ext3 is one of the few that actually will journal data as well as metadata.

    mount -t ext3 -odata=journal /dev/os/usr /usr
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  7. Re:Your graphs are unreadable by eddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    >Web site accessibility (use image type supported by all major browsers)

    All the "good features" of GIF is supported by PNG in all current browsers. You'd have to go back in time fem years to find a browser that can't display a basic PNG. If you think otherwise, give me a link to one that matters that doesn't, and explain to me why, if it wasn't released/updated this year, using it isn't a security issue.

    Since GIF doesn't support per-pixel-alpha to begin with, you lose nothing by using PNG for everything. After all, with GIF you didn't have the choice at all so there is no issue with simply "converting to PNG".

    Score: PNG

    >Bandwidth conservation

    PNGs are always smaller where it matters (anything more complex than 1x1x1-images). In some not atypical cases a PNG can be 25% smaller than the corresponding GIF.

    Score: PNG

    PS. GIF-via-LZW is still encumbered in many countries.

    More features, better standard, solid software, no licensing issues, smaller output == Winner: PNG

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  8. ext3 options by kardar · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are options, or settings, that you can do for ext3, the default is slower, but it saves your data. Ext3 not only journals metadata, like XFS, etc... but it also journals data, which is the only filesystem that does that, if I understand this correctly.

    "data=writeback" mode does no data journaling, only metadata journaling, and you would probably see better performance here. Although, you could lose data in the event of a power outage (no fun). Same thing applies to XFS, JFS - you could lose data because only metadata is being journaled, not real data.

    "data=ordered" mode - inbetween, still no data journalling, but there are provisions that make it less likely to lose data in the case of a power problem. It has something to do with the way it journals the metadata and the way the filesystem interacts with the disk that makes is a little slower than data=writeback but also a little more secure than data=writeback if you get a power outage.

    "data=journal" mode - this journals data and metadata, and with the exception of a few situations, is the slowest. The least likely to lose your data, but also much slower.

    I am assuming, or at least it looks like, these tests were run with the default data=journal - so to be fair, they should have been run in data=writeback, or maybe even all three modes. Again, all you have to is specify in /etc/fstab and reboot, no big deal.

    It would probably be better to compare the ext3 in data=writeback mode.

  9. Re:Your graphs are unreadable by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative

    IE is still too stupid to properly do an alpha channeled PNG. But it does do 1-bit, GIF-style transparency and displays generic, non-transparent PNGs just fine. And so the only place left to use GIF for is crummy animations.

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