6-Way File-System Comparison On The Linux 4.1 Kernel

When running Dbench with six threads, the results were rather close but XFS this time edged out for its first win in today's testing.

With the initial create process of Compile Bench, F2FS returned to being the fastest followed by EXT4 and then XFS.

For PostgreSQL, F2FS and ReiserFS along with EXT4 tended to be the fastest file-systems while Btrfs was the slowest (note those using Btrfs with databases probably want to set the "nodatacow" mount option).

Well, there you have it for the latest round of in-tree Linux 4.1 file-system benchmarks. Depending upon the workload, the results can vary quite substantially. However, in picking the file-system to use for a production system, there are many other factors to consider such as the extensive tuning options available to each file-system as well as the reliability of each file-system (namely in reference to Btrfs and F2FS) and other non-performance factors (RAID capabilities, native file-system compression or encryption, etc).

What file-system are you using on your Linux system(s)? Share with us your thoughts in the forums. Once again, for those wondering how EXT4 / Btrfs / XFS over time, there are Fedora and Ubuntu systems testing the latest mainline kernel code daily over on LinuxBenchmarking.com.