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Mike Benoit recently posted a link to results from his new and improved file system shootout, using better hardware and running more tests. Using two benchmarks that are designed to measure hard drive and file system performance, Bonnie++ and IOZone, he's compared a number journaling filesystems found in the 2.6 kernel [forum]. Included in the lineup are EXT2 (not journaling, but an effective baseline [story]), JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, and EXT3 each compared head to head on both SCSI and IDE drives.
In Mike's summary he labels JFS and XFS as 'best bang for your buck' explaining, "While not the fastest file systems, both of them consistently perform close to EXT2, while using minimal CPU. XFS seems to be faster over a wider range of benchmarks, however it does use slightly more CPU than JFS. While JFS really starts to slow down with lots of files." As for pure speed, Mike points to Reiser4 which really shined in the Bonnie++ benchmarks, though not quite so much in the IOZone benchmarks. He suggests, "ReiserFS v4 will [definitely] be worth while keeping an eye on, especially considering some of the exciting new features it offers."
Grant Miner posted some interesting benchmark results to the lkml, comparing five journaling filesystems available with the current 2.6.0-test2 development kernel. The tests were conducted with a very simple shell script, mainly timing how long it takes to copy, tar, and remove directories, performing several syncs in between. He summarizes:
- ext3's syncs tended to take the longest [at] 10 seconds, except
- JFS took a whopping 38.18s on its final sync
- xfs used more CPU than ext3 but was slower than ext3
- reiser4 had highest throughput and most CPU usage
- jfs had lowest throughput and least CPU usage
Some interesting discussion follows, debating the results and offering further suggestions on making the tests more useful. For example, Andrew Morton [interview] proposed including ext2 in the tests as a baseline, and Hans Reiser noted that reiser4 continues to improve rapidly. Read on for the full test results and much of the following discussion.
