Real-World Benchmarks of Ext4

Ashmash writes "Phoronix has put out a fresh series of benchmarks that show the real world performance of the Ext4 file-system. They ran 19 tests on Fedora 10 with changing out their primary partition to test Ext3, Ext4, Xfs, and ReiserFS. The Linux 2.6.27 kernel was used with the latest file-system support. In the disk benchmarks like Bonnie++ Ext4 was a clear winner but with the real world tests the results were much tighter and Xfs also possessed many wins. They conclude though that Ext4 is a nice upgrade over Ext3 due to the new features and just not improved performance in a few areas, but its lifespan may be short with btrfs coming soon."

Comments

One filesystem to rule them all...

[INeededALogin]

and in the darkness... bind them.

Seriously... one of the nice things about Windows, OSX, Solaris is that they get a new filesystem once every 5-10 years. The safest thing to do for Linux is to be a generation behind. I would not run ext4 until btrfs came out. Why be the admin that gets screwed with early bugs and future incompatibilities...

Re:One filesystem to rule them all...

[Vancorps]

You think validating the integrity of a filesystem is easy??!?!?

That's insane, first of all, you won't know how it performs unless you give it real world usage complete with disk failures. There are hundreds of file systems which can store data but how they handle problems are what separates most of them. Of course there are other distinctions but the failure mode scenarios are what most interest an admin as failure is never a question of it, only a question of when. Simulating certain failure modes is exceedingly difficult to do.

Re:short lifespan? The big distros will decide.

[INeededALogin]

it just doesn't matter THAT much for most applications

well... run an fsck against ext2 and ext3 and tell me it doesn't matter. For an admin, speed, reliability, recoverability... are all major concerns. On Solaris, I love ZFS because of the functionality like snapshots and exports. I also got burned by the IDE/100% CPU driver bug on Sparc hardware. Admins need to be aware of what they are running and what limitations exist. I honest don't give a damn about mp3 encoding speed, but the capabilities and maturity of a filesystem have to be considered.

Dumbest benchmarks ever

[Nick Ives]

I see no analysis as to why the filesystems perform the way they do. Why does XFS perform so well on a 4GB sequential read and so badly on an 8GB read? Why did they include cpu / gfx bound frame/sec benchmarks? In the few application benchmarks where there was more than a tiny fraction of percent difference there's no discussion as to whether that difference is actually significant.

Not at all enlightening.

Useless.

[Steve Baker]

What's with the CPU/Video tests? How about some more random access pattern tests, DB/web/streaming media tests? How about showing CPU utilization in addition to I/O performance?

Re:Short lifespan? I don't think so.

[diegocgteleline.es]

Hey, ext4 actually speeds up fsck quite a lot, so maybe ext4 won't be around a lot of time ;)

Re:Stupid testing methodology

[ChrisA90278]

who measures things like MP3 compression time when testing a filesystem?!?

They were measuring what matters: "System performance" It very well could have been the case that the fastest file system, measured on a simple bench mark gives the worst MP3 compression time. Let's say the reason the filesystem is fast is because it uses a huge amount of CPU time and RAM. So a RAM based encrypted file system might be very fast, until you run an application on it.

It's a reasonable test and what it showed is that in the real-world performance is about the same