Btrfs File-System For Old Computers?

With the first FS-Mark, which was pushing 1,000 files of 1MB size, the Btrfs file-system performance matched EXT4 when both were at their defaults. When enabling Btrfs compression (Zlib was beneficial, but LZO compression was of the most benefit) the scores went up. The scores also went up when not enforcing the disk barriers.

When running the same test but not enforcing sync/fsync calls, the stock Btrfs file-system did even better than EXT4. Btrfs was up by approximately 30%. The Btrfs disk compression was also of tremendous benefit here. The other mount options had little impact on the results.

When running a larger test of 5,000 files and splitting that between four threads, Btrfs by default was slower than EXT4 by a small margin, but the Btrfs compression allowed the Oracle-sponsored file-system to speed ahead. Not enforcing disk barriers also provided a speed boost.

The final FS-Mark test was of 4,000 files split between 32 sub-directories. For this test, the Btrfs and EXT4 performance was comparable with the default mount options. The no check-sum data and no copy-on-write data options were of some benefit, but the most benefit was using the Zlib/LZO compression and then disabling of barriers.