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Benchmarking Linux Filesystems Part II
Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Gazette has a new filesystem benchmarking article, this time using the 2.6 kernel and showing ReiserFS v4. The second round of benchmarks include both the metrics from the first filesystem benchmark and the second in two matrices." From the article: "Instead of a Western Digital 250GB and Promise ATA/100 controller, I am now using a Seagate 400GB and Maxtor ATA/133 Promise controller. The physical machine remains the same, there is an additional 664MB of swap and I am now running Debian Etch. In the previous article, I was running Slackware 9.1 with custom compiled filesystem utilities. I've added a small section in the beginning that shows the filesystem creation and mount time, I've also added a graph showing these new benchmarks." We reported on the original benchmarks in the first half of last year.
This was definitely an issue in testing here. The wide range of "winning" filesystems for the different tests clearly indicates the bottleneck is somewhere other than the disk. In most modern systems, this isn't an issue.
From TFA: ReiserFS takes a VERY long time to mount the filesystem. I included this test because I found it actually takes minutes to hours mounting a ReiserFS filesystem on a large RAID volume.
Looks like this guy makes a habit out of using systems with 500MHz CPUs... my dual 3GHz xeon box mounts a 1.2TB raid5 array formatted with ReiserFS in about 33 seconds, give or take a couple seconds.
Based on the geometric mean of all the benchmark times for each filesystem, which effectively weights all benchmarks equally:
JFS won
EXT2 and EXT3 took 17% longer than JFS
XFS took 29% longer than JFS
Reiser3 took 38% longer than JFS
Reiser4 took 52% longer than JFS
Now, 1.52 seconds is not a whole lot longer to wait than 1 second. With any luck we'll see a post from Hans explaining why Reiser4 took longer, or what sacrifices were made to make the others faster, if there are any.
Anyway, how is the average user supposed to be concerned by these results?
In my daily work I manage hundreds of GB's of data and have hardly seen a significative difference between XFS, JFS and ReiserFS v.3 on relatively modern hardware (Tyan S2882 Pro motherboard, two Opteron 244 processors, 4 GB RAM and two 250-GB SATA HD's) running OpenSuSE 10. I put the most important data on a XFS partition but also have a small ReiserFS partition which can be read from Windows.
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