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Btrfs Is Not Yet the Performance King
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."
Where's the "-1, tired and worn out" mod option?
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?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?
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=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
With Btrfs still being unstable and slow, what is going to happen to it once Oracle completes it's purchase of Sun and gets ZFS and Solaris?
Dual Opteron < $600
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.
I didn't RTFA but why no mention of ZFS?
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> What's the advantage of XFS over ext3?
Well I can only speak for my own experience, and obviously yours may be different. But I've had better luck with XFS stability as well as handling of multi-gigabyte files and directories that contain many files. I was soured early on based on some bad experiences with both ext2 and ext3, went to XFS, and haven't had a problem since.
For me deleting very large files is almost instantaneous on XFS, but drags on and on using ext3. I like XFS on my media server box but also use it on a desktop machine. It's also hugely scalable.
Extents and delayed allocation are the big ones, both of which are available in ext4, reiser4, and btrfs.
Unfortunately, xfs is more likely to eat data in individual files than ext3 or ext4 w/ data=ordered. It's apparently less likely to end up with an uncorrectable superblock.
xfs is also horrifically slow for random access of smaller files. If your application calls for massive files, such as databases or a porn library, xfs is preferable over reiserfs or ext3, comparable to ext4, but for general use you're better off with ext3/4 or reiserfs. (by reiserfs I mean 3.6, not reiser4. I can't speak for reiser4)
It's important to remember that there is no one fs to rule them all. Any time anyone tells you "*fs is the best filesystem" they're suffering from fanboyism. xfs is probably not the ideal filesystem for / on a desktop system, but it's a great filesystem for a partition on a server running a database or a fileserver serving large files, or for a DVR application like mythtv.