Benchmarking Filesystems Part ||

Question

Hi,
Probably most of you here read Slashdot and probably everyone have already read this benchmark article. For those who didn't:
Benchmarking Filesystems Part II, by Justin Piszcz
It looks really suprising. It appears that ReiserV4, which all seem to be so fond of, isn't the best idea for low-CPU machines or laptops (where CPU usage=power). I wouldn't be really suprised if it's benchmarks wouldn't shine on fast machines either.
I'm currently running ReiserV3 (and, as pointed out in the benchmark, it's mounttimes suck), but after reading this article I think of moving FSs. Ext3 seems to have gotten a lot better since last benchmark - too bad dir_indexing wasn't benchmarked. I've never really checked out XFS or JFS, but judging from the article these look really promising. Anyone tried these?
Thoughts/comments/overall discussion follows...

Answer 1

Here are my findings. Again, between hardware and users' needs, YMMV. My results for XFS, for example, probably won't apply to you if you have a fast SATA or SCSI drive, and you'll find ext3 grossly lacking if you're dealing with filesystems of petabyte size (e.g. systems that handle data from particle colliders).
- JFS is fast, CPU efficient, and generally rocks. It's not quite as good with lots of small files as ReiserFS, but very close, and appears to have faster read speeds.
- Indexed ext3 is very very very fast for just about everything... except pacman. It seems, for some reason, that the pacman "database" gets fragmented a bit faster on ext3 than on other filesystems. The slight sluggishness of pacman isn't a showstopper though, and pacman-optimize usually takes care of it for a while. Other than that, though, indexed ext3 is very good.
- Non-indexed ext3 is very slow. My general recommendation is to never use ext3 without directory indexing.
- ReiserFS is pretty good. There's supposedly a performance hit from tail packing, but I've never seen increased performance with tail packing turned off. I do have a major complaint about it though: journal replay on mount, which takes forever for large volumes.
- XFS is incredibly slow, and causes a lot of hard drive grinding, especially when dealing with lots of small files - although for me, it doesn't perform well with large ones either. I've heard tell of ways to make it perform better with small files, but never found details on them, and I'm betting they're quite mythical; at any rate, I don't think it would make a difference, as this filesystem seems to disagree with my HDDs.
- Ext2 (nonjournalled) should NEVER be used on hard drives. I learned this in a rather irritating way, when my ext2 boot partition became corrupted when I accidentally hit the power switch while my machine was still on, and a kernel panic message greeted me on the next boot. There's a good reason to use journalled filesystems, folks!