In my own usage I've noticed that ntfs-3g takes about 6x the time to mount compared to the kernel ntfs driver.
Luckily mount times are only relevant on boot, and nobody serious runs linux on ntfs.
Making EXT4 a COW filesystem would have been seriously stupid.
The whole point of EXT4 was to make incremental changes on top of EXT3 - changing to a COW system would have required a rewrite from the ground up. Which is exactly the point of BTRFS.
Okay, so why are not Ext4 and btrfs being tested through FUSE too?
Michael, thanks for the tests. While I still don't think these are really "benchmarks", they certainly provide interesting real-world data, which is what we want, after all. Very good job overall; it must have taken significant effort to get these tests to run as well as they did.
I'll echo others' concerns that the tests are still being run on a single disk configuration, meaning that it is probably not informative for those who are seriously considering btrfs or zfs for server use. But for desktop users, these tests are indeed meaningful.
I like seeing ext4 being the performance leader almost always, and this is a good justification for using it on desktops. The filesystem-related data loss rates on ext4 are down low enough these days on 2.6.34+ that most desktop users can use it and get the performance benefit. Hopefully said desktop users don't keep any really important data on their computer without backing it up somewhere, like their email or a thumb drive -- 95%+ of desktop computers don't run a redundant RAID array, so that means you are always vulnerable to hardware failure, let alone software failure. So backup backup backup, etc., and then use your awesome ext4 performance to get your work done.
I do wish ext4 were COW and supported snapshots, but I have a feeling that would also kill some of the places where its performance excels. You can't have it all. Or, who knows, maybe Ted will come out with ext5 that combines all the advantages of ext4 with COW and snapshotting....![]()