Slashdot Mirror
Linux Filesystems Benchmarked
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
The original article
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
tests on popular Linux filesystes
So did the tests come back positive or negative? Systes are nasty things, and early detection is important to increase chances of survivability.
Remember kids. Test early, and test often. You files will thank you.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
EXT2 has better throughput
EXT3 has better file handling capablities
Reiser has better search ablity
XFS has better delete capablities
JFS may be a better choice in regards to file manipulation Subject to debate of course...
This is good information to know, but for a project I'm working on I need to know which filesystem can take the most abuse. I'm talking about power-outages and hard-resets mostly. I know I should go journalled, but which one? What else should I keep in mind.
Maybe slashdot needs a filesystem update to one with more powerful meta-data support like something that can detect when the same URL has been used in more than one post within a certain time. Sheesh.
That is, before it melted.
Duplicate, spelling errors, and nothing but the short submission. Google is relaunching its blogger service -- tell me again what slashdot provides over it?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
You're right, that was a total surprise.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
And the reason is that you used jpegs. jpegs are for photographs; use gif for images such as this. The text won't end up unreadbly blurry and you'll save tons of disk space/bandwidth.
Do you have ESP?
I mean, really. "Mad about You" was a fine TV show... but this good?
How long until we see McKellenFS?
http://209.81.41.149/~jpiszcz/index.html
:)
it's not slashdotted yet
here is the winner. FAT 16
Site already /.'ed (when will slashdot ever learn to use a cache - either freecahce or make their own?)
Anyway, all rants aside, here's the conclusion from the tests (there were some graphs as well but I couldn't make sense of them anyway):
CONCLUSION
For those of you still reading, congrats! The conclusion is obvious by the "Total Time For All Benchmarks Test." The best journaling file system to choose based upon these results would be: JFS, ReiserFS or XFS depending on your needs and what types of files you are dealing with. I was quite surprised how slow ext3 was overall, as many distributions use this file system as their default file system. Overall, one should choose the best file system based upon the properties of the files they are dealing with for the best performance possible
See the whole article and a full range of hideously colored full sized graphs here before it gets slashdotted too. Speaking of which, there has got to be better graph making software out there in Linuxland......
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Right now I'm running reiserfs under gentoo and I recently lost some rather important data, which has made me a little skeptical in using it in a production system. Therefore I'm asking you guys which filesystem do you think is good for a webserver that will be handling a medium sized database and a significant number of transacations each day.
While they do measure stuff like access times in ms, they don't mention recovery times (chkfs) that are mentioned in ms for reiserfs and mins for ext2. And they don't mention reinstallation times (measured in hours) which occurs for ext2 a lot more than the journalling filesystems :-)
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Personally I could care less which file system is fastest. The most important aspect to a file system is how stable it is with my important data. All the speed in the world means absolutely nothing if the file system is not stable. EXT 3 has never ever let me down so I intend to stick with it, at least until RedHat releases their version of GFS.
Got Code?
It would be nice to see an unbiased comparison with NTFS (though it would be difficult seeing as how you can't get it to run natively on *nix afaik)
It's slashdot's mob tactics again. Now Taco will call their ISP and ask them "Are you SURE you don't want our protection? Certainly protecting the servers you love is worth some...compensation." If they say no, another posting of this story as soon as the admins "forget" this one.
I've been using ReiserFS _EXCLUSIVELY_ since about 2.4.11 and I've never had a single problem. It's important to format with the defaults and not specify 'special' arguments to mkreiserfs or you can run into trouble.
I've got three systems currently running reiser on Gentoo, from my PowerPC/SCSI/NFS/Samba file/print server to the ancient Compaq laptop with a 4GB drive. I've never had as much as a hiccup from ReiserFS.
Under what circumstances did you lose data?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I've never understood why they don't move to ReiserFS, at least for new installations. With Fedora you have to use a kernel option to enable ReiserFS installation and with RHEL you can't install to a ReiserFS root, even the reiserfs kernel module is in their kernel-unsupported RPM which means don't call for help. I love RH but they need to get the ball rolling on this one!
What I'd like is a file system for which there is actually a defrag-tool. Sure, ext2/3 may try to reduce fragmentation as much as possible, but when it happens (as is likely when you have a near-full disk) you've got little or no way of fixing it. Or actually there is a defrag tool for ext2 (not ext3) but my experiences with it are not the best -- it took forever and I don't know that it actually did anything to the disk (fdisk didn't report a 0% fragmentation level afterwards anyway).
on a global scale FAT is becoming the top health problem.
Here's a mirror of the article:l
http://www.gutenpress.org/links/LG/102/piszcz.htm
RFC2119
I've never understood why they don't move to ReiserFS, at least for new installations.
Because for most uses, it's not the best option. So, if you're going to junk ext2 compatibility, why would you go to Reiser?
From FreeBSD, that is... Would be nice to see that compared to Linux' FS-es. As in this earlier benchmark (PDF).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...making Linux just a little more fun!
/dev/zero. /dev/null.
Benchmarking Filesystems
By Justin Piszcz
INTRO
I recently purchased a Western Digital 250GB/8M/7200RPM drive and wondered which journaling file system I should use. I currently use ext2 on my other, smaller hard drives. Upon reboot or unclean shutdown, e2fsck takes a while on drives only 40 and 60 gigabytes. Therefore I knew using a journaling file system would be my best bet. The question is: which is the best? In order to determine this I used common operations that Linux users may perform on a regular basis instead of using benchmark tools such as Bonnie or Iozone. I wanted a "real life" benchmark analysis. A quick analogy: Just because the Ethernet-Over-Power-Lines may advertise 10mbps (1.25MB/s), in real world tests, peak speed is only 5mbps (625KB/s). This is why I chose to run my own tests versus using hard drive benchmarking tools.
SPECIFICATIONS
HARDWARE
COMPUTER: Dell Optiplex GX1
CPU: Pentium III 500MHZ
RAM: 768MB
SWAP: 1536MB
CONTROLLER: Promise ATA/100 TX - BIOS 14 - IN PCI SLOT #1
DRIVES USED: 1. Western Digital 250GB ATA/100 8MB CACHE 7200RPM
2. Maxtor 61.4GB ATA/66 2MB CACHE 5400RPM
DRIVE TESTED: The Western Digital 250GB.
SOFTWARE
LIBC VERSION: 2.3.2
KERNEL: linux-2.4.26
COMPILER USED: gcc-3.3.3
EXT2: e2fsprogs-1.35/sbin/mkfs.ext2
EXT3: e2fsprogs-1.35/sbin/mkfs.ext3
JFS: jfsutils-1.1.5/sbin/mkfs.jfs
REISERFS: reiserfsprogs-3.6.14/sbin/mkreiserfs
XFS: xfsprogs-2.5.6/sbin/mkfs.xfs
TESTS PERFORMED
001. Create 10,000 files with touch in a directory.
002. Run 'find' on that directory.
003. Remove the directory.
004. Create 10,000 directories with mkdir in a directory.
005. Run 'find' on that directory.
006. Remove the directory containing the 10,000 directories.
007. Copy kernel tarball from other disk to test disk.
008. Copy kernel tarball from test disk to other disk.
009. Untar kernel tarball on the same disk.
010. Tar kernel tarball on the same disk.
011. Remove kernel source tree.
012. Copy kernel tarball 10 times.
013. Create 1GB file from
014. Copy the 1GB file on the same disk.
015. Split a 10MB file into 1000 byte pieces.
016. Split a 10MB file into 1024 byte pieces.
017. Split a 10MB file into 2048 byte pieces.
018. Split a 10MB file into 4096 byte pieces.
019. Split a 10MB file into 8192 byte pieces.
020. Copy kernel source tree on the same disk.
021. Cat a 1GB file to
NOTE1: Between each test run, a 'sync' and 10 second sleep were performed.
NOTE2: Each file system was tested on a cleanly made file System.
NOTE3: All file systems were created using default options.
NOTE4: All tests were performed with the cron daemon killed and with 1 user logged in.
NOTE5: All tests were run 3 times and the average was taken, if any tests were questionable, they were re-run and checked with the previous average for consistency.
CREATING THE FILESYSTEMS
(snipped. too many junk characters0
BENCHMARK SET 1 OF 4
In the first test, ReiserFS takes the lead, possibly due to its balanced B-Trees. (If the images are hard to read on your screen, here's a tarball containing larger versions of them.)
All of the files systems faired fairly well when finding 10,000 files in a single directory, the only exception being XFS which took twice as long.
Both ext versions 2 and 3 seem to reap the benefits of removing large numbers of files faster than any other file system tested.
To make sure this graph was accurate; I re-benchmarked the ext2 file system again and got nearly the same results. I was surprised to find how much of a performance hit both ext2 and ext3 take during this test.
Finding 10,000 files seemed to be the same except for XFS; however directories are definitely handled dif
What was the reason for the panic? I've been running my system HARD for years without any panics.
If your hardware or kernel has problems you can hardly blame a filesystem that's expressly designed for high-reliability hardware for data loss.
'journalling' is not any better than none when it comes to flaky hardware or a badly compiled kernel. All it means is that you don't have to wait an hour for fsck to run. The whole point of a journalling FS is that it 'knows' what files are suspect after a major outage and it quarantines them, it's not any better at preventing them from being corrupted.
All in all, I can say that Linux an other Unices are VERY sensitive to improper halts/panics/shutdowns. I've hosed several OS X machines by not exiting gracefully, and several Linux boxes too. Your number-one priority when setting up a system is to do what it takes to keep it from crashing, ever.
When I built my desktop I carefully selected components that were 100% Linux-compatible so I wouldn't have issues like the ones you described.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I have been using XFS on a Laptop for 2+ years who's hardware was bleeding edge at the time of purchace.
Because of hardware/configuration issues, I have had to hard-reboot the laptop countless times during the months that hardware support in the kernel caught up. (It works pretty well now).
I have never borked my filesystem.
Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 1 both ship with JFS support -- the graphical installer, however, does not offer it as an option.
So, what I usually do when installing a new copy of Fedora or Redhat is to drop to a console, and use fdisk + mkfs.jfs manually. Then, when I get to the right page in the installer, I can simply set it to not reformat the partition but to use it as the "/" mount point, and voila -- my computer has JFS.
When you see bar graphs with two items its just plain silly.
Hey, he's management material! Quick promote him!
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
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.
/etc/fstab and reboot, no big deal.
"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
It would probably be better to compare the ext3 in data=writeback mode.
Does anyone have any statistics for how HFS+ (testable with Darwin stacks up against these other filesystems?
mbbac
Lynx.
It doesn't support GIF either though.
I use ReiserFS, because on average - it is a faster filesystem than EXT3 for most desktop purposes. I personally feel that EXT3, however, is a more reliable FS when it comes to recovering bad data on the hard disks. I recently had some failures due to a failing motherboard, which corrupted some data on my drive, but the reiserfsk tools have cryptic descriptions for failures and don't always seem to do the job right when it comes to recovering bad data. I've had reiserfsck work properly, but the few times that I have had hard drive failures, I've had little success in recovering bad data on a ReiserFS partition.
I must admit though, that any problems I've had on a ReiserFS system weren't necessarily the fault of the filesystem (instead were related to failing hardware). I've run several machines, with multiple drives, which all use ReiserFS. It's been quite reliable in that sense.
I guess that the only way you're going to get true reliability is to make redundant backups.
Why is it that every benchmarking article contains the words "The results may surprise you?"
Have any of you ever been surprised?
Arg, he also needs to just pick one color for each filesystem. I mean, he must want to torture his audience by constantly switching the colors and then making the legend so tiny and mucked up by JPEG artifacts, that one can't tell which bar goes to which filesystem.
Well, the simplest answer is that Stephen Tweedie is their filesystem guru, so why not use his baby in their OS. However, that's not the real answer. SCT is a clever guy, and mature enough to not let pride get in the way of the best possible system. (a similar question: Why does sun still use UFS?) For Redhat, EXT3 is probably the best general purpose filesystem, particularly for the root drive. Redhat is interested in selling on servers, where the root filesystem is not the bottleneck. You install the OS onto EXT3, which has decent performance and is very mature. Then you install your database / exported directories / mail spool / whatever onto the filesystem that is best for that job.
Ext3 is a very close cousin to Ext2, which has been around for a very long time, and changes very slowly. Reiser has grown and changed a LOT in the last three years, including some metadata changes that effect on-disk structures. Though it has stabalized lately, Redhat is correct to be cautious. XFS and JFS, though very mature filesystems on other OSes, have only recently become tightly integrated with the Linux kernel. Though technically controlled by the linux kernel community, all three of these other filesystems are really controlled by little cabals of people within IBM/SGI/ and then Hans Reiser. While these groups try to be transparent in their development process, Ext3 is very transparent in its development and direction.
One other tremendous advantage that Ext3 inherits from Ext2 is a fast, versatile, and effective fsck program. Journals are great in the event of power failures. However, they do not protect against Windows, or a faulty fibre channel driver, or uninformed sysadmin who accidently writes over the first 1 MB of the disk. Fsck.Ext2 is one of the best around.
You know - if it works, don't fix it!
Ext3 is stable and there's a lot of useful available tools for it.
If, for the end user, the difference is marginal, why bother to make things more difficult than necessary for yourself?
Or maybe they've received unusually many bug reports for ReiserFS and thus concluded it's not stable enough for them to push it. After all, they want to be associated with (amongst other things) reliability.
Stop the brainwash
"Both ext versions 2 and 3 seem to reap the benefits of removing large numbers of files faster than any other file system tested." If that's not a joke, it should be.
What the heck is a 'sig'?
I did a bunch of tests like this, but in 2.6 instead of 2.4. My conclusions:
* Ext2 is still overall the fastest but I think the margin is small enough that a journal is well worth it
* Ext3, ReiserFS, and XFS all perform similarly and almost up to ext2 except:
o XFS takes an abnormally long time to do a large rm even though it is very fast at a kernel `make clean`
o ReiserFS is significantly slower at the second make (from ccache)
* JFS is fairly slow overall
* Reiser4 is exceptionally fast at synthetic benchmarks like copying the system and untaring, but is very slow at the real-world debootstrap and kernel compiles.
* Though I didn't benchmark it, ReiserFS sometimes takes a second or two to mount and Reiser4 sometimes takes a second or two to unmount while all other filesystem's are instantaneous.
Whole thing available here
Seriously, all the time we see benchmarks like this that are just done on the same machine with the same setup. Who knows if there is some unseen problem or bottleneck (in this particular case the CPU is weak).
We need a large sample base. Different types of chipsets, CPU's, hard-drives, etc. Then we can better see the big picture or at least see how the filesystems might perform on a system similar to your own.
So I'm calling for a "filesystem benchmark" page were people can post their results from a standard set of benchmarks. Something where they can include their system specs/setup and everything.
Then maybe we'll get useful information.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
ext3 does NOT journal data by default, it only "orders" it (data=ordered). This is still better than what any of the other filesystems do. You have to explicity define data=journal in fstab to get full data journaling. There is a performance hit but it's what I use on all my RAID5 data filesystems and it's great. I used to use reiserfs until a huge crash corrupted massive amounts of files and directories. I don't think I'll be going without data journaling protection for a while.
There is also some commentary and recommendations based on their results.
One more note about the tool... it's not well documented but works well when configured... note that you need a kernel that supports the filesystems to be tested (duh!), Use python 2.2, the database schema is somewhere in the comments.
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.
So, what I usually do when installing a new copy of Fedora or Redhat is to drop to a console, and use fdisk + mkfs.jfs manually
You're making things unnecessarily complicated. At the "boot:" prompt, just type "linux jfs". The graphical installer will then offer it as an option. Works with reiserfs, too.
You can see benchmarks of it at www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html
I no longer will even attempt to use EXT3 for a filesystem ~500GB or larger. Had problems repeatedly with a couple of 1.6TB filesystems and switched to Reiser3 and haven't looked back...
/ /boot /data /dev/shm /usr /var /raid1 /raid2
# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 4032092 548856 3278412 15%
/dev/sda1 505605 19171 460330 4%
/dev/sda7 41729164 31165820 8443572 79%
none 2000568 0 2000568 0%
/dev/sda3 10080520 6437952 3130500 68%
/dev/sda2 80636072 45306536 31233364 60%
/dev/sdb1 1600772128 1462009904 138762224 92%
/dev/sdc1 1600772128 760247416 840524712 48%
PS. No, it's not pr0n
oh no, all those people running IE 3 can't see png, better not use it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Gah! The charts are shrunk so that the labels are hard to read, and the order of the results and color assigned to each FS seems to have been picked randomly for each chart, so once you squint and decipher one of them...you have to start over on the next.
A superior string of tests would be to simulate, to as close a degree as possible, a real, live high-use environment such as a scaled-up Perforce server, a supremely busy mail server, a giant busy database, or a massive web server.
A single process running through 10,000 files isn't particularly realistic: since when does a scaled-up server sit there and hammer the filesystem with just a single process? What about contention? Caching?
And what about recovery from errors? I didn't once see what happens if something blorts over random parts of the filesystems.. how does Reiser handle this? Ext3? XFS? Are there recovery tools in case of catastrophe?
What about these file systems stuffed into RAID volumes of various stripe sizes and configurations?
Straight deletes, creates, or modifications are useless because the only time you're going to be doing something like that is when you rm -rf * or building a new environment for.. something. Daily use, however, which eats up far more time (and thus would save the most user time if improved) is something which should been better accounted-for.
I'm rapidly approaching the point where I need support for file sizes greater than 2GB. Quite frankly, most of what I've found about file sizes and file systems is 2 to 4 years old... Everyone's too concerned with speed!
I'd like to see a set of benchmarks regarding stability and fidelity of the various filesystems. Which ones are the most durable? Which ones get corruption the most, and what are their corruption/data-loss ratios? Performance isn't the end of the world for me....but losing data *is*.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
This is a post to remove the effects of my moderation to this comment. When I first moderated, earlier this morning, this comment's parent post was ranked at +4 informative and an earlier post (by 1 minute) was ranked as redundant. I moderated the earlier one up (which was fine) and this one down as Redundant (which was not fine as it violated my rule about moderating someone as redundant for a post within 5-10 minutes of the original)
Anyway, this is all part of me being anal about little things like this.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Wow...I'm really surprised that I don't see anyone else around here bashing this "benchmarking" as totally ridiculous. Get it together, people! I mean, how does a group of folks that typically pride themselves on shredding the foolish articles that come by miss these beauties:
1) This guy goes out with the stated goal of evaluating real-world performance...so he starts by throwing out all real benchmarks. Of course, those tools are designed by experts to try to represent real-world performance, but who cares, right? Instead, our jackass throws together a bundle of random operations and times them. No thought is apparent in the choices of the operations, and no discussion is given as to why the choices were made.
2) The conclusions are drawn by simply adding the times of all the tests together. If you haven't figured out why this is dumb as a rock, let me explain: test #1 took 23-40 seconds, while test #2 took .02-.04 seconds. So, in his conclusion, test #1 was weighted 1000 times as heavily as test #2. I don't know about you all, but I for one don't feel that touching speed is 1000 times as important as finding speed.
3) Even if he had normalized all the times so that the mean in each test was the same and then added those, he would still be wrong...various tests ought to be weighed differently, because real-world usage doesn't do all of these things the same amount. That said, the weight given to the tests needs to be well thought out and planned, rather than arbitrarily assigned (accidentally) without paying any attention. Interestingly enough, this sort of purposeful weighing of tests is exactly the sort of thing done by the real benchmarking tools that this idiot threw away.
4) Perhaps this one isn't as important...but this guy can't make a graph to save his life. Half the bar graphs put time on X and the other half put time on Y. Graphs that obviously should be bar graphs are made into dot-line ones. The text is blurry and you can't tell the colors in the key.
Anyway, I still don't get why everybody around here seems to have missed all this...it was painfully obvious to me when I just took a cursory glance at it.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Ugh. HFS+ is not a Unix filesystem. It's a Macintosh filesystem, introduced in OS8, that's been modified so it can play nice with a Unix-like OS. Darwin/OSX also use old, slow, reliable Berkeley FFS, the filesystem on which ext2 was patterned. HFS+ isn't an ideal Unix filesystem, because it doesn't have case-sensitivity by default, and it has features that would be wasted by typical Unix. The reasons it's there in OSX are backward compatibility and speed. Some carbon applications refuse to run on an FFS partition, and OS8/9 can't read FFS. The FFS code in Darwin is also very old now (most of it is late 80's tech), and the performance shows. The nifty things that the real BSD's have done to speed it up (soft dependencies, etc.) haven't found their way into the weird mach almalgam that is XNU.
Write support of HFS+ works under GNU/Linux.
My mail server's been chugging along for about 4 years now, and is terrifically reliable. So, I turned off the fsync() calls, so things like that don't really matter any more, as the kernel's disk cache can do what it was designed to do. Throughput went up by more than a factor of ten.
Some day, a fan, power supply, or UPS will die. But getting 10x the performance for 4+ years justifies losing the two minutes worth of email that wasn't flushed to disk when that day comes.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Here's some real world information on the state of large file support in 2004. Filesystem driver support is the least of your worries -- almost any linux filesystem you can think of (except for maybe umsdos) supports over 2GB files at the kernel level. The Linux LFS page, dated April 2004, contains reasonably updated information on large file support in linux.
The bigger problem is that many userspace applications cannot yet read or write to the large files. This failure arises from non-use of the LFS API combined with just plain unfortunate use of a signed 32-bit int in the wrong place. So for instance mkisofs will reject all input files larger than 2GB in size, and cdrdao will simply abort at 2GB if you try to rip a DVD larger than 2GB in size. In some extreme cases there are programs that can't even handle large files off of the disk; one example is
wget http://mirror.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core /test/1.92/i386/iso/FC2-test3-i386-DVD.iso
which fails spectacularly on any x86 linux system (hint: the DVD is not really 84MB in size). In general, the "core" system utilities such as dd, cp, mv, cat are fully compatible with large files whereas third party applications are much more hit-or-miss.
Even today, by far the most practical solution to large file woes is to migrate to a 64-bit system, the most affordable of which is AMD64 by a long shot. I've been using an Athlon 64 system for the past few weeks and it has handled large files perfectly in all respects so far.
Sun uses UFS because it is still the best filesystem for a root filesystem.
A more interesting question is: Why do Linux zealots incessantly rag on UFS?
...time to fsck, and recovery after a crash for the journaled file systems ? These are of greater importance to me than 10000 deletes. How long will it take to verify my file system of 300GB after the sysadmin killed power to the wrong server ? Did I lose any data ? you know the drill.
With all due respect, as your website states:
and (on the download page):I would say benchmarks need to be performed with released products. It doesn't help most users if Vendor X claims his vaporware beats all competitors. Now, I know this isn't the case with ReiserFS here -- it isn't vaporware -- but it isn't production-ready either according to Namesys. You're just unfortunate in that this benchmark was performed just before the release of your next version which would have performed better.
On the other hand, any benchmarks published on the Web ought to be updated whenever a new version of a tested product is released -- add the results of the new version and keep the old one as well, for comparison purposes.
Just some datapoints to counter yours:
We (ISP) had about 5 major data loss disasters with ext3, 3 with XFS and only 1 with reiserfs.
And we use far more reiserfs than ext3 or xfs. So from a reliability standpoint for us, reiserfs is by far more reliable than ext3 or xfs.
Although less hyped, JFS is doing pretty well so I see. I've been checking out other benchmarks as well. Some people mentioned it's even faster than XFS in some cases. I myself am using Reiser but I'm looking forward to checking out JFS in the future. It's been in the kernel long enough to have stabilized. XFS in kind of young in 2.4. Yes it has exsited before as a patch but I won't use anything on production systems until Linus accepts it in the mainstream kernel.
if you really matter about filesytem performance you'll use some options like disabling access time updating.
ext2 should be mounted with noatime, reiserfs with noatime,notail,nodiratime etc..
not using the usual performance-oriented mount options (only the ones that don't compromise FS security) :(
makes this benchmark a lot less meaningful