Linux 3.3 Kernel: Btrfs vs. EXT4

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 3.3 Kernel: Btrfs vs. EXT4

It's that time of the Linux kernel development cycle again... Here are benchmarks of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems with the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.3 kernel.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17111

[mayankleoboy1]

I am disappointed by the stock performance of BTRFS. It has been said to be the next standard linux file system and it cant compete with ext4.
Is transparent compression the only saving grace of BTRFS?

[fackamato]

I am disappointed by the stock performance of BTRFS. It has been said to be the next standard linux file system and it cant compete with ext4.
Is transparent compression the only saving grace of BTRFS?

Not sure if trolling...

Default mount options are used. Besides, have you even looked at the features of btrfs?

[renkin]

Not sure if trolling...

Default mount options are used. Besides, have you even looked at the features of btrfs?

Obviously not, if he thinks transparent compression is the only thing btrfs can do that other linux filesystems can't.

[Xake]

TBH I really would like seeing a MD-RAID0+BTRFS (and maybe MD-RAID+EXT4) <-> BTRFS-RAID0 comparison, and also the same for all other levels BTRFS currently supports (i.e. 1 and 10, with 5-6 in the pipeline IIRC).

[FourDMusic]

Thanks for the update Michael on the BTRFS development. I can't wait to see her stretch her legs when she gets into the wild.

I'd like to see more benchmarks with different features of btrfs and ext4 turned on (besides SSD mode). Not only does this provide me with information about btrfs features, but information on what I might be able to squeeze out of the file system in terms of performance for my hard disk. These types of articles, for me, are small guides on how to get my hardware to function at its best.

I've learned a lot from your compiler/mesa optimizations. Could you extend this to your file systems benchmarks?

~Much appreciated!

[drag]

I am disappointed by the stock performance of BTRFS. It has been said to be the next standard linux file system and it cant compete with ext4.
Is transparent compression the only saving grace of BTRFS?

I don't see why you should be. At least not from these benchmarks. These benchmarks are artificial and only show very specific aspects of the file system... most of which is almost entirely irrelevant to most people's use cases. They really likely have very little bearing on what it is going to be like to run them in your desktop or a production system.

The principal advantage that Ext4 is going to have is that some of it's code is decades old and has hundred's of man-hours poured into it's development. It is very mature and there is very little that is going to surprise you with it and best practices are well established and widely known.

Btrfs on the other hand is going to require years of in-field usage and wide scale deployment before it can compete with Ext4 with that. But what Btrfs offers is significantly enhanced ability to manage data and from a administrative standpoint this is going to be invaluable once people learn to take advantage of it.

.. which is not visible to the filesystem, so compression still matters a lot.

Maybe, maybe not.

Most data people care about performance nowadays is already heavily compressed. If you care about, say, your ability to use Linux to manage multimedia files then compression is utterly irrelevant on the file system level and on the controller level. They use format-specific compression techniques and the chances of file system compression helping out is _NONE_AT_ALL_.

Now if you are dealing with thousands of plain text files ranging in size from 2MB to multiple GBs then compression is something that is probably going to matter a lot to you. That is, of course, you are not already using gzip or whatever to compress your data.

[liam]

Phoronix: Linux 3.3 Kernel: Btrfs vs. EXT4

It's that time of the Linux kernel development cycle again... Here are benchmarks of the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems with the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.3 kernel.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17111

I'm very impressed with btrfs' performance.
I can recall it being much slower than ext4 on pretty much every test, now, with stock butter, it is typically competitive.
Presumably enabling compression would close the gap in every benchmark (obviously some more than others).
So now, we need btrfs to have a file repair utility and online defrag for consumers.

[neuron]

Anyone seen any % of compression for the different algorithms with filesystem level compression? I've seen a bunch of performance benchmarks, but none of the includes how much space you save, and I'm on an SSD so I'd be quite interested in that

[liam]

Anyone seen any % of compression for the different algorithms with filesystem level compression? I've seen a bunch of performance benchmarks, but none of the includes how much space you save, and I'm on an SSD so I'd be quite interested in that

If you're using a sandforce controller then the controller is already performing compression.