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

Short lifespan? I don't think so.

[Viol8]

Admins tend to stick with what they know and ext4 is a natural progression from ext3. btrfs however hasn't even reached version 1.0 yet - and to be honest who is going to want to use a 1.0 release anyway on something as fundamental as a filesystem? Also its development is being done by an Oracle team , albeit FOSS , which may put a few people off.

My prediction for what its worth is that ext4 will be around for a LONG time.

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

[Azar]

I was wondering why it was omitted from this article as well. I believe that it's because JFS just doesn't seem to have the mindshare of ext3, XFS, or even ReiserFS. After reading various filesystem comparisons, I chose it as my FS and I have been using it for over a year without a single issue. I don't have to worry about long fsck times at reboot, my CPU has less load when deleting or copying a large volume of files (virtual machines or CD/DVD isos usually), never had any file loss or corruption, and it seems to complete large file operations quicker than ext3 (what I used previously). There are some things that ext3 does better than JFS, but overall I prefer the advantages of JFS over the advantages of ext3.

I know that if I were to rebuild an older computer that had lower specs, or perhaps a set-top box like MythTV that I wanted to be more power effecient then JFS is going to be my choice for the filesystem.

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

[MrNemesis]

I've used JFS extensively for several years now, including power outages when the discs were under load - and I've never had anything fail to correctly fsck when the power came back up. fsck is also far, far faster than ext3 or XFS and CPU loading is *way* lower than XFS, whilst maintaining comparable throughput. I don't like XFS for the simple reason that if you don't have bulletproof power you will be restoring from backup. And when you've been in the job for as little as a few years you soon come to realise that *nothing* is bulletproof. Even triple-UPSed, six diesel generators, four seperate power lines and a five nines SLA with your data centre are no protection against a hung-over techie pulling the power cables from the wrong server.

JFS also gets ACL access "for free"; if you use it like I use it, as the backed for a Samba server (~300 users) with a complicated ACL structure, JFS is much faster. Last time I fiddled with ACL's under ext3, I found they introduced a small, but percetible, increase in filesystem latency - don't know if this has been fixed, but using ACLs under JFS incurs no penalties, at least as far as my testing goes [citation needed]

IMHO JFS is one of the hidden gems of Linux - fast under varying workloads, robust, frags up nowhere near as badly as ext2/3 when getting full, incredibly simple... the only downsides I'm aware of are that you can't shrink it and the fact that no-one seems to "support" it.

Re:One filesystem to rule them all...

[TheRaven64]

NTFS is the result of the requirements team taking too long to decide what a filesystem should do. The filesystem team on the original NT project couldn't wait for them to decide, so they produced something very simple that just stored mappings from names to two kinds of data, big and small values. Big values are stored as one or more disk blocks, small values are stored in the Master File Table (MFT).

On top of this is a metadata layer, where certain types of name are interpreted in different ways. This was used to add ACLs, encryption, compression, copy-on-write semantics, and so on.

The low-level format for a Vista NTFS partition is the same as for NT3.51, but each version of NT has added a few more types of metadata and interpretations of them, meaning that writing to a disk with an older version is likely to cause data corruption.

Re:XFS

[sohp]

Blood to squeeze? How about a new stone? Solid-state drives.

SSDs. Yep, they will completely change the rules for filesystems. Decades of tricks and tweaking to deal with rotational latency and head movement have virtually zero application in SSDs. All the code for that will become worse than useless. It will have to be removed or at least turned off. Leaving it on will actually result in worse performance on SSDs.

Re:XFS

[lysergic.acid]

hrm, i don't know that SSD has gained enough widespread adoption for a mainstream filesystem to be optimized for solid state rather than mechanical rotational storage. however, you do raise an interesting point. perhaps a new filesystem can be designed from the ground up optimized for SSD. whoever gets into this area of development right now will have a huge lead on competitors when SSD storage solutions finally achieve price parity with spinning media.

Re:butterfs

[Barsteward]

nah, thats R-ICE-HER-FS

Re:ext2?

[Microlith]

And it works for drives of up to 2TB. Really the only problem is 4GB max file size.

I had forgotten about those two particular limitations of Fat32 and it struck me when you mentioned them that we're about to run across the first. I had personally hit the 4GB limit a while back but at the rate things are going, before 2009 is out we'll see disks released that a single Fat32 partition doesn't support.

To think that when it was released with Windows95, people saw the 2TB limit and committed the first sin of computing technology: assuming an upper bound is beyond reach.

Re:ext2?

[Hal_Porter]

You could extend FAT32 to handle bigger drives. The 2TB limit comes from the fact the the volume size is limited to 2^32 sectors. With a hard disk that's 2TB.

One possibility would be to add a 32 bit volume size in clusters field to the FSInfo sector which already contains the first free cluster and the free cluster count. FAT32 has the upper 4 bits in a FAT entry marked as reserved which limits you to 2^28 clusters. You bump the filesystem version in the bootsector and use all of the bits in a FAT entry. With those two changges you could have 2^32 clusters which is 256TB with 64K clusters.

It's the same with the 4GB limit. You could use one of the spare bytes in the directory entry to have more bits of filesize. Some Doses do this and call it FAT+

Mind you, the reason people use FAT32 is because it is supported by everything. If you did either of these things you'd end up with a file system which wasn't supported by anyone. Old implementations would either corrupt volumes which were more than 2TB or had files bigger than 4GB or fail to mount them.

Now Microsoft have something called exFAT, a completely new filesystem which is incompatible with FAT32 and patented so it's not really in their interests to keep adding features to FAT32 which is now more or less open. At least I don't think many people paid them royalties and they haven't sued anyone to get them.

Re:How do you take a _consistent_ snapshot with LV

[ToasterMonkey]

I remembered another little known built in NTFS feature few people know about. Maybe those of you genuinely interested in filesystem features & backups, not OS religion will appreciate it.

Change journaling.

I don't think there is a native GUI for this, instead the backup vendor provides one, or handles it for you.
It is specifically meant for backups. Instead of scrubbing the entire disk and comparing to previous records to find changed files, with the change journal enabled, incremental backups consisting of millions of files are pretty quick. Well, discovering the list is MUCH faster anyway, backing up a million 1k files sucks regardless. The beginning of a backup can actually be very resource intensive, and time consuming without this feature. It has a small overhead, but each time you perform a backup operation the journal resets, releasing that overhead.

Anyone know where this feature might have originated from? AFAIK Solaris and Linux don't have this ability, and being backup specific, I can't imaging the FOSS world even dream of it. Well, now you know, copy away :)

Re:ext2?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF man I can't believe I assembled and executed your signature ... damnit

Re:XFS

[Tubal-Cain]

All of those filesystems are designed to work on raw flash

Exactly. Theoretically, manufacturers could do away with the Flash-to-IDE interfaces.

Re:ext2?

[Atti K.]

In fact, journaling is a performance breaker in pretty much every i/o intensive scenario, such as database servers. Ext2 is still the preferred choice on servers here.

Ext2 itself is kind of a performance breaker :)

Don't get me wrong, I like ext2/3, I use only ext3 on all my machines and other machines I install, it's the only Linux fs I really trust. (back then when Suse defaulted to install reiserfs, I always changed that :) But we have to admit that it's not the best-performing fs on Linux.