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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."

5 of 468 comments (clear)

  1. 'Tis a dupe by AntiOrganic · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The original article

  2. The result is...... by Fuzzums · · Score: 0, Redundant

    ... Slashdotted!!!

    And that didn't surprise me at all ;)

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  3. Re:I'm shocked! by System.out.println() · · Score: 0, Redundant

    That's a surprise? You must be new here.

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  4. Results questionable by Sxooter · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Sorry, but there are a few reasons these results are questionable. As one poster has already pointed out, ext3 by default journals both meta data (i.e. directory structure) AND data. The other three by default only journal meta data.

    But more importantly than that is the fact that in linux, that IDE drive is responding immediately to fsync requests before it's actually done them. I.e. when the journaling file systems says "hey, did you get that stuff written out to the disks?" The drive says "yes sir!" Then writes it out whenever it gets a chance after that.

    This means that you may well have a corrupted directory structure should the machine lose power in the middle of writing data, because the hard drive LIED to the OS, and the journaling file system flushed out it's journal when it wasn't actually written to the disk.

    To get trustworthy results, you need to either 1: turn off the write cache on the IDE drive or 2: Use SCSI, which doesn't lie about such things.

    As long as you're writing to an IDE drive with an enabled 8 meg cache, the results are worthless, because you don't actually have the reliability you think you have, and the numbers might change drastically when you start using drives (like SCSI) that actually fsync properly.

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  5. It'd be better under 2.6 by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 2, Redundant

    He benchmarked 2.4, which these days is a bit...pointless. Ext3 has a lot of improvements only in 2.6, just like the other FSs. 2.4 filesystems are in "mainteinance mode" where in 2.6 there's been a large amount of development. If he'd run 2.6 he could benchmark reiser4 too.