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Btrfs Is Not Yet the Performance King

Posted by timothy on from the happy-churning dept.

Ashmash writes "Benchmarks of the Btrfs filesystem have been published by Phoronix that compare it to the XFS, EXT3, and EXT4 file-systems. In the end they conclude that this next-generation Linux filesystem is not yet the performance king. In a great number of the tests, the EXT4 filesystem that was designed to be an interim step to Btrfs actually performs much better than the unstable Btrfs, albeit Btrfs still has more advanced features. Fedora 11 even took longer to boot when using Btrfs than EXT3 or EXT4."

12 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Stability, reliability by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't care which filesystem is fastest. Kcryptd is the bottleneck on my system, so it really doesn't matter how fast the filessytem is. I want to know which filesystem is the most robust. What filesystem is least likely to lose data?

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    1. Re:Stability, reliability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      With file systems, speed and data integrity are trade-offs.

      Not at all. ZFS is a perfect example. Not only is it faster than any Linux file system, but also far more flexible, reliable and far far less likely to lose your data.

    2. Re:Stability, reliability by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is always a trade off between performance, correctness/robustness, and features.

      Pick 2, and don't complain when a 99.99999% guarantee of no data loss is dog slow compared to a filesystem that offers minimal protection against (meta) data loss.

    3. Re:Stability, reliability by onefriedrice · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think it's important to keep in mind that it is the GPL that is incompatible with other free licenses, not the other way around.

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    4. Re:Stability, reliability by Nevyn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're right, Sun had no idea their new license would be incompatible with Linux because they wanted to be compatible instead of doing the slimy thing and trying to make it be a selling point over using Linux, which everyone was doing. Alas. for them RMS and Linus travelled back in time and created/used the GPL just to thwart poor Sun.

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  2. How is this news? by Burkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What is newsworthy in the fact that a less tested and less stable filesystem is slower than filesystems that are more mature, stable and well-tested?

  3. Numbers for mysql performance on BTRFS? by Smidge207 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Btrfs is mainly created for the Oracle client that doesn't want to use "raw device". It's to improve performance reading/writing large files with high concurrency. So it have to be fast on concurrent request.

    What should be looked is :
    how mysql perform on BTRFS
    how postgres perform on BTRFS
    how firebird perform on BTRFS

    As there is no magical solution, btrfs is no exception. It's not a general usage FS as is ext (imho). On the desktop, xfs will be the way to go. Performance-wise it's obviously not so great (I do realise that it's still in development and this might change in the future), and the features it delivers are not very interesting as well imho, except maybe for the online defragmentation thingy. But I'm not an enterprise user whis is what this fs aims at I assume.

    Still I appreciate the work. Let's hope it doesn't get axed now that Oracle owns Sun and thus already has ZFS.

    cheers

    =Smidge=

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  4. several useless metrics by Khashishi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    not sure why phoronix decided to include several test cases which are clearly bottlenecked by something other than the filesystem. Obviously, all 4 filesystems are gonna score the same.

    1. Re:several useless metrics by vondo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Because Phoronix does really crappy pointless benchmarks all the time. Occasionally they sucker me into reading them and I always wish I hadn't

  5. try again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    with linus ranting against ext4 i expected to find 'ordered' (mount option to make ext4 acceptable) in the f****** article at least once, but didn't.
    so, please guys: do yourself a favour and do the benchmark again! benchmarking ram against platters ain't fair!

  6. ZFS? by javacowboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I didn't RTFA but why no mention of ZFS?

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    1. Re:ZFS? by pigeon768 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The short version is that ZFS isn't available for linux, and this is a linux FS benchmark on a linux specific site.

      You could run the same benchmark on OpenSolaris vs Linux on the same hardware, but this wouldn't be particularly meaningful: different storage stack, vfs, etc. Even if the benchmark convinced someone that ZFS is better, they couldn't switch to it, because again, there is no linux port.

      You could benchmark the userspace ZFS on Fuse driver, but this is meaningless because the Fuse ZFS implementation is useless (slow + unstable) and everyone knows it.