Linux Filesystems Benchmarked 468
smatt-man writes "Over at Linux Gazette they ran some tests on popular Linux filesystems (ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, xfs) and the results may surprise you."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Linux Filesystems Benchmarked
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
Not a clear winner (Score:5, Interesting)
EXT2 has better throughput
EXT3 has better file handling capablities
Reiser has better search ablity
XFS has better delete capablities
JFS may be a better choice in regards to file manipulation Subject to debate of course...
Slightly OT (Score:3, Interesting)
Hrmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Best Filesystem for Production System (Score:3, Interesting)
Any chance of including NTFS? (Score:3, Interesting)
It works for mine! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got three systems currently running reiser on Gentoo, from my PowerPC/SCSI/NFS/Samba file/print server to the ancient Compaq laptop with a 4GB drive. I've never had as much as a hiccup from ReiserFS.
Under what circumstances did you lose data?
So why does RedHat/Fedora continue to push EXT3? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Best Filesystem for Production System (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Defragmenting filesystem? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/manpages/xfs_fsr.
Re:Best Filesystem for Production System (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I pinned it down to a faulty drive (Quantum Fireball, hehe, which never acted up under NTFS/Win2k.. oh well). I was close to blaming reiserfs, but once I put in a quality hard drive and reinstalled, it's run like clockwork. Perfectly.
There sure haven't been too many stabilty issues with reiserfs in my experience. Try another drive as a test and see if the same happens.
Re:Any chance of including NTFS? (Score:4, Interesting)
WinFS is designed to utilize the database feature, I'd be really curious about the results of searching for a file in NTFS/WinFS versus a linux file system. Hopefully NTFS linux support improves to the point where we can safely use it as a linux filesystem.
Data recovery is my biggest issue right now with linux. It's damn near impossible to rescue data off a failed linux disk. Even just deleting a file is tough to recover from. NTFS has a nice selection of tools (albeit non-free) to safely and reliably recover data.
What about SoftUpdates? (Score:5, Interesting)
Purpose of Journalling (Score:5, Interesting)
If your hardware or kernel has problems you can hardly blame a filesystem that's expressly designed for high-reliability hardware for data loss.
'journalling' is not any better than none when it comes to flaky hardware or a badly compiled kernel. All it means is that you don't have to wait an hour for fsck to run. The whole point of a journalling FS is that it 'knows' what files are suspect after a major outage and it quarantines them, it's not any better at preventing them from being corrupted.
All in all, I can say that Linux an other Unices are VERY sensitive to improper halts/panics/shutdowns. I've hosed several OS X machines by not exiting gracefully, and several Linux boxes too. Your number-one priority when setting up a system is to do what it takes to keep it from crashing, ever.
When I built my desktop I carefully selected components that were 100% Linux-compatible so I wouldn't have issues like the ones you described.
HFS+ (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So why does RedHat/Fedora continue to push EXT3 (Score:3, Interesting)
I must admit though, that any problems I've had on a ReiserFS system weren't necessarily the fault of the filesystem (instead were related to failing hardware). I've run several machines, with multiple drives, which all use ReiserFS. It's been quite reliable in that sense.
I guess that the only way you're going to get true reliability is to make redundant backups.
Re:So why does RedHat/Fedora continue to push EXT3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Ext3 is a very close cousin to Ext2, which has been around for a very long time, and changes very slowly. Reiser has grown and changed a LOT in the last three years, including some metadata changes that effect on-disk structures. Though it has stabalized lately, Redhat is correct to be cautious. XFS and JFS, though very mature filesystems on other OSes, have only recently become tightly integrated with the Linux kernel. Though technically controlled by the linux kernel community, all three of these other filesystems are really controlled by little cabals of people within IBM/SGI/ and then Hans Reiser. While these groups try to be transparent in their development process, Ext3 is very transparent in its development and direction.
One other tremendous advantage that Ext3 inherits from Ext2 is a fast, versatile, and effective fsck program. Journals are great in the event of power failures. However, they do not protect against Windows, or a faulty fibre channel driver, or uninformed sysadmin who accidently writes over the first 1 MB of the disk. Fsck.Ext2 is one of the best around.
These test need to be run on more machines (Score:4, Interesting)
We need a large sample base. Different types of chipsets, CPU's, hard-drives, etc. Then we can better see the big picture or at least see how the filesystems might perform on a system similar to your own.
So I'm calling for a "filesystem benchmark" page were people can post their results from a standard set of benchmarks. Something where they can include their system specs/setup and everything.
Then maybe we'll get useful information.
Re:Defragmenting filesystem? (Score:5, Interesting)
These days you could just use a second disk. It would be faster, too.
I wonder if there's some way for a RAID to constantly, dynamically optimize itself. After all, it's striped and redundant, there must be all kinds of funky tricks you can play to reorganize data on the fly...
Re:Not a clear winner (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a mailserver which have about 20GB mail with Reiser. With Ext3 it would be over 30GB.
Re:Speed means absolutely nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
GFS has a nice, relatively asynchronous journal implementation. However, I don't know that it will perform well on small file I/Os, particularly deletes. It's also somewhat complicated to configure and manage. Seems like a real bother if you're not going to use it in a cluster.
They really should have benchmarked V4 not just V3 (Score:5, Interesting)
You can see benchmarks of it at www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html [namesys.com]
Re:Slightly OT (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard that EXT3 cannot shrink and that ReiserFS is the only one that can. While not a demo of shrinking, here's [ibm.com] part 2 of a 3-part series of articles on using ReiserFS with LVM. This segment shows off resizing a partition without even unmounting it!
Re:Best Filesystem for Production System (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Not a clear winner (Score:2, Interesting)
Unrealistic testing environment. (Score:3, Interesting)
A single process running through 10,000 files isn't particularly realistic: since when does a scaled-up server sit there and hammer the filesystem with just a single process? What about contention? Caching?
And what about recovery from errors? I didn't once see what happens if something blorts over random parts of the filesystems.. how does Reiser handle this? Ext3? XFS? Are there recovery tools in case of catastrophe?
What about these file systems stuffed into RAID volumes of various stripe sizes and configurations?
Straight deletes, creates, or modifications are useless because the only time you're going to be doing something like that is when you rm -rf * or building a new environment for.. something. Daily use, however, which eats up far more time (and thus would save the most user time if improved) is something which should been better accounted-for.
Re:EXT3? Lots of files changing? Increase your ... (Score:3, Interesting)
My mail server's been chugging along for about 4 years now, and is terrifically reliable. So, I turned off the fsync() calls, so things like that don't really matter any more, as the kernel's disk cache can do what it was designed to do. Throughput went up by more than a factor of ten.
Some day, a fan, power supply, or UPS will die. But getting 10x the performance for 4+ years justifies losing the two minutes worth of email that wasn't flushed to disk when that day comes.
steve
Re:So why does RedHat/Fedora continue to push EXT3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun uses UFS because it is still the best filesystem for a root filesystem.
A more interesting question is: Why do Linux zealots incessantly rag on UFS?
Re:What about SoftUpdates? (Score:4, Interesting)
For more info on softupdates versus journalling, see Soft Updates [usenix.org] and Journaling versus Soft Updates [usenix.org].
But where are the other 'important tests' like.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Datapoints contrary to yours... (Score:4, Interesting)
We (ISP) had about 5 major data loss disasters with ext3, 3 with XFS and only 1 with reiserfs.
And we use far more reiserfs than ext3 or xfs. So from a reliability standpoint for us, reiserfs is by far more reliable than ext3 or xfs.
JFS (Score:3, Interesting)
not a real-world test (Score:2, Interesting)
if you really matter about filesytem performance you'll use some options like disabling access time updating.
ext2 should be mounted with noatime, reiserfs with noatime,notail,nodiratime etc..
not using the usual performance-oriented mount options (only the ones that don't compromise FS security) :(
makes this benchmark a lot less meaningful
Re:Best Filesystem for Production System (Score:3, Interesting)
It's only the best choice if used by computer literate people.
I've had to travel 500km one time too much to fix a reiserfs-using-desktop-computer that didn't want to boot due to ReiserFS spitting out strange error messages and waiting for input.
Not having heard the messages before, nor managing to discern them over the phone, I finally had to travel far too long just to fix the damn computer.