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Software Linux

Linux File System Shootout 437

Posted by simoniker from the bang-bang-it's dept.
IpSo_ writes "Finally an extensive, human readable Linux file system benchmark has been unleashed upon us. Originally posted on the Linux Kernel mailing list, using two of the most popular benchmarking tools available, it compares all the major file systems, including their different mount options. The results are surprising."
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Linux File System Shootout More

Linux File System Shootout

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  • human readable ? (Score:4, Funny)

    by gokulpod ( 558749 ) <gpoduvalNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:05AM (#7170019) Homepage
    I am sorry..all I see are numbers floating around. Does someone have a "human readable" summary of this ?

    • Re:human readable ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mr_Perl ( 142164 )
      Green is good (fastest) and red is bad (slowest)

      HTH
    • JFS is looking pretty good on the IOZone benchmarks, but the Bonnie++ benchmarks look more mixed in their findings. Remember, a benchmark is only as good as it's .... ??? WTF ?

    • Re:human readable ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:21AM (#7170080) Homepage

      The human readable result is you need to know what you want. There is no silver bullet.

      It looks like xfs wipes the floor for all but temporary (loads of create/delete) file usage. Jfs looks like the best all-rounder. Reiser looks like something that can be tuned to the specific usage, but eats CPU for breakfast, lunch and dinner and EXT3 "surprise, surprise" sucks rocks. The other "surprise, surprise" is that EXT2 is still very good for many uses.

      Frankly, I do not see anything new and fascinating in the results, but they are good to throw at people who keep asking me "why not EXT3" and "Why XFS or EXT2". Here is why!

      • Re:human readable ? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Tet ( 2721 ) *
        EXT3 "surprise, surprise" sucks rocks.

        Really? You must be looking at a different set of benchmarks to me, because as I see it, ext3 is running a close race with XFS to take second place behind JFS. Remember, ext3's journalled mode is journalling data as well, and hence it isn't fair to compare it to other filesystems directly as it's doing much more work (equally, ext2 comes out on top for a number of things because it's doing far less work). Others like reiserfs, XFS and JFS are journalling metadata only

        • Re:human readable ? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by blixel ( 158224 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:50AM (#7170337)
          eally? You must be looking at a different set of benchmarks to me, because as I see it

          So much for the "human readable" aspect of these benchmarks. Everyone seems to be walking away with a different idea of what the results are supposed to be showing.

          Since there was no legend explaining what the colors meant, I couldn't figure out anything from looking at them. Is the high number good? As in did the most work? Or is the high number bad? As in took the longest amount of time to do something?

          • Re:human readable ? (Score:4, Informative)

            by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @08:00AM (#7170619)
            Since there was no legend explaining what the colors meant, I couldn't figure out anything from looking at them. Is the high number good? As in did the most work? Or is the high number bad? As in took the longest amount of time to do something?

            Depends on the column. For K/sec, higher is better, so red cell shows lowest, and green shows highest. For %CPU, lower is better, so green shows lowest and red shows highest. It's not that complicated really if you take a few minutes to look at it. What you get from the data depends on what you were looking for in the first place.

      • Re:human readable ? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by budgenator ( 254554 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:53AM (#7170343) Journal
        The other "surprise, surprise" is that EXT2 is still very good for many uses.
        especialy if the file system can be mounted read-only; you could do this in partitions like /boot, /opt, /lib, and /usr that hold programs and are not changed often.

        I wonder if the kernal version makes a difference, are the xfs and jfs better on the 2.6 as compared to say the 2.4.19 that I'm running now; or how about with files that are much smaller like on the typical web server?

        also partioning schemes can make a big difference in overall performance, in the old days i placed the swap partition in the center of the disk (most accessed in the center where the heads are most likely to be) the next most likely like /usr and /var beside the swap so the heads didn't have to move to far to get to them ect.

        also does the disk make a difference, such as is any performance differences consistant between scsi and ide drives?

        These are things that need to be looked at before make a decision as to which is best, but it definately appears that we need to do some looking now

  • Cheaters! (Score:5, Funny)

    by borgdows ( 599861 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:06AM (#7170022)
    NTFS has been removed of the benchmark results because it was the best performer in every test!

    • Re:Cheaters! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by davFr ( 679391 )
      Indeed It would be very interesting to see the results of the microsoft fs supported by linux (fat32, ntfs), as well as more exotic ones (BSD, Netfs, minix, etc).

  • /.ed already? (Score:2, Informative)

    by tqft ( 619476 )
    Can someone with it open mirror it please - will not open. All I can get is a 685b file

  • Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bazik ( 672335 ) <bazik&gentoo,org> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:08AM (#7170033) Homepage Journal
    Woah, looks like JFS performs really well!
    Anyone has good/bad experience using JFS?

    Hmm... I think I'll setup my test box with JFS...

    • Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by matticus ( 93537 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:13AM (#7170052) Homepage
      Well, here's [ibm.com] IBM's page about it.


      From what I've seen poking around USEnet, JFS seems to have the too little, too late problem. I've never seen it pwn a benchmark like it did today though.
      I'm a little confused-I have been told XFS is the best designed, highest performing file system, and I would hate to think SGI is getting into a lot of this crap with SCO for a relatively slow journaling file system...

      • Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Frodo420024 ( 557006 ) <(kd.nrognaf) (ta) (kirneh)> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:29AM (#7170104) Homepage Journal
        I'm a little confused-I have been told XFS is the best designed, highest performing file system, and I would hate to think SGI is getting into a lot of this crap with SCO for a relatively slow journaling file system...

        IIRC, XFS is more about guaranteed performance under various stressful conditions than about getting the absolute peak speed in calm conditions.

      • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Time to rethink things. The generally accepted opinions between the two are that JFS is faster for small files and XFS has a bit of an edge with larger files. Both perform very very well.

        I don't know how JFS falls in the "too little to late" catagory, both file systems have been available for a long time on Linux, however very few Linux distributions embrase them during installs so they have gone unknown to a great deal of the non-storage geeks out there. Mandrake, much to their credit, has for a long t

      • Reliability? (Score:2, Informative)

        by hofer ( 84209 )
        We did a lot of testing with various file systems for a product earlier this year. After a couple of terabytes of intensive reads/writes (and a couple of days...) the JFS kernel processes randomly locked up and blocked all disk I/O operations (1.1.0 and 1.1.1 versions). JFS was indeed the fastest of the file systems we tested, but we had to drop it for being unreliable.

        I wonder if anyone has some experience with the reliability of the current version?

    • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ATitan ( 714287 )
      I've got a 120 gig WD disk with JFS in my fileserver at my home network work. It's fast and since it's sharing multimedia, there is a lot of moving around, deleting and copying files around and still it's very fast writing on it ( according to my experience ).

  • Throughput benchmarks only... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pe1chl ( 90186 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:11AM (#7170043)
    There is have focus on throughput in these benchmarks. Reading and writing lots of data, seeking in files and reading data, etc.

    Notably missing are more day-to-day useful operations such as the creation and deletion of lots of files, parallel action on many open files,
    lots of files in a directory, etc.

    When I want to select a filesystem, I do not want to know how fast it can read a 3GB file sequentially. I want to know how well it performs on a fileserver, mailserver etc.

    • Re:Throughput benchmarks only... (Score:5, Informative)

      by zurab ( 188064 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:00AM (#7170194)
      Have a look at Hans' benchmarks at namesys.com [namesys.com]. Although he only compares Reiser4 to ext3, and may not be an objective party. But I'm surprised how well JFS performed anyway and that Reiser4 is unusually CPU-intensive.
    • When I want to select a filesystem, I do not want to know how fast it can read a 3GB file sequentially. I want to know how well it performs on a fileserver, mailserver etc.

      Horses for courses, my friend. If you are running a database or doing video editing then reading large files is exactly what you do want. This is exactly what SGI's customers do, and that is why XFS is IRIX default filesystem.

    • file size a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @07:31AM (#7170489) Homepage Journal
      If 30 33.3MB files (bonnie test) are not representative of your needs, please download the scripts. You can then modify the parameters for thousands of 2k files and post the results. Lots of people would be intersted, you know.
  • and i cannot make head or tail of that. it should read "uber linux haxx0r geek readable". could someone please explain - in lamens terms, which one i should be using to stream my avi's off to my xbox (www.xboxmediaplayer.de) using SMB shares? ;)

  • Short summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by mst76 ( 629405 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:13AM (#7170051)
    iozone benchmark
    best: jfs
    worst: ext3_journal

    bonnie++ benchmark
    best: ext2
    worst: reiser4/reiser4_extents, ext3_ordered/ext3_journal

    • Re:Short summary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:51AM (#7170161) Journal
      bonnie++ benchmark
      worst: reiser4/reiser4_extents

      You might think that just based on the amount of red in Reiser4's row, but if you look all the way over to the right, you'll notice something interesting: Reiser4 often completes the benchmark in significantly less time than the other filesystems. Reiser seems to be caching a lot of flak for the CPU usage (certainly it gets a lot of red boxes in this benchmark because of it). Personally, though, I've got CPU to spare. Disk seek times aren't changing drastically anytime soon, unlike CPU speeds. If I can trade some CPU cycles for less wasted disk seek time, I think that's a great trade.

      • Re:Short summary (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Afrosheen ( 42464 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:04AM (#7170204)
        Christ, where are my mod points when I need them most, you deserve a +1 Insightful for this.

        I totally agree. CPU cycles are alot less important on my box than disk seek times. Then again, I'm guessing that the people this will be most relevant for are those running servers. Mine are all running reiserfs and ext2.
      • Not always, though, and there are definite limits. If CPU usage is too high, throughput will suddenly depend critically on the overall load of the system. To take an extreme, if it sucks up every available cycle, you can no longer depend on running other tasks while one is blocking for disk IO. There is a point, depending on the applciation and overall system load, where sacrificing more CPU for higher disk performance will hurt overall execution speed. And for stuff that is both disk and CPU intensive, tha

        • Re:Short summary (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Hard_Code ( 49548 )
          The question is, I think, does CPU load for non-disk-IO related tasks tend to increase when disk IO tends to increase. Is there a correlation? I would argue against it. Typically programs fetch data, and THEN perform operations with it. IMHO, in order to derive a cpu load/disk load correlation, you would apparently have to be doing LOTS of SMALL disk IO while simultaneously using lots of CPU. I don't think many programs operate this way. Many programs access lots of disk in small pieces, and many prog

          • Re:Short summary (Score:4, Informative)

            by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:03AM (#7171046) Homepage
            Actually, at least in our case we thread the app, with one thread handling disk IO and other threads handling other aspects (such as CPU intensive stuff), precisely to squeeze out a bit more performance and so disk accesses do not interfere with and stall other stuff. You get this as soon as you try to do something in soft realtime (such as video applications). On one hand, you want to stream video to/from a drive as quickly and efficiently as possible; on the other, you want to do some CPU-intensive operations (filtering, resizing) on the video stream at the same time.

            I'm not saying that trading CPU for filesystem speed is a bad idea; it isn't. What I'm saying is that it's not a simple "more is better" function, and that the cutoff for when it no longer makes sense does depend a lot on the application you intend it for. Again, to take an extreme, you would not want to have a system where the filesystem eats so much CPU the rest of the system essentially blocks, starved for CPU time, when the disk is used.

            To take an even more extreme way of doing the tradeoff: you could compress and uncompress all data on the fly. That way you would increase transfer speed (and increase it quite a bit in the case of text files and similar) as well as decrease disk usage. It is not often done, though, because the tradeoff is not worth it in general.

            For us, and our app, Reiser is on the wrong side of that cutoff point (and Reiser4 is not even on the horizon yet).

      • this benchmark was performed using a 200Mhz CPU (Score:5, Informative)

        by hansreiser ( 6963 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:21AM (#7171171) Homepage
        which makes the whole thing pretty questionable in my view, especially when you consider that Nikita got completely different results on his more modern hardware (see www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html)

        I don't really target 200Mhz CPUs in my performance tuning....;-)

        Hans

        • Re:this benchmark was performed using a 200Mhz CPU (Score:5, Informative)

          by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:25AM (#7171837) Homepage
          How true a difference the hardware makes.

          I took an old PII-350 w/ 128MB RAM and benchmarked ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, and xfs on an old 5GB IDE drive. ext2 was the winner by a margin (raw throughput).

          Now I'm beating up various hardware and software RAID configs on a dual Athlon MP 2200+ system w/ 2GB RAM and dual 3ware 8-port 7500 controllers w/ 180GB WD drives. JFS rises above the rest in terms of throughput (I didn't test XFS on this new machine), and, of course, reiserfs simply spanks everything in terms of file creation/deletions. The thing I noticed was the JFS had much lower CPU utilization for file creations/deletions and was twice as fast at it than the ext2/3 filesystems (it still got spanked by reiserfs, though).

          If anyone's interested, the "best" overall was reiser w/ the mount options noatime,notail,nodiratimeall. Also, if anyone cares, on this machine, the Linux software RAID code at no less than twice the performance numbers over the 3Ware hardware RAID. Running RH9 with all RH updates applied.

      • To me the most important issue is response time. I replaced the standard EXT3 with ReiserFS and have seen a marked improvement when accessing files on disk. I have alot of small files on my workstation - so reiser really works for me.

        Now, if I had a few large database files, then I might think of changing to something else - but I don't have that situation on my workstation, and probably never will. To echo what Spy Hunter said, I am willing to trade some CPU cycles for more efficient data retrieval - m

    • Re:Short summary (Score:2, Informative)

      by tanveer1979 ( 530624 )
      Note fellas, though Bonnnie says reiser4 series is worst, reiserfs is one of the good ones, hanging on above avg in all counts!

      Me bit confused here, arent file systems which come new(like ext3 etc) supposed to be better than the older ones!?

      • Re:Short summary (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Reiser4 is now better in some areas, mainly speed. It is not fairing well because it is still unfinished. The Reiser4 team are now focusing on two things before releasing a more final version: increased stability and reduced processer usage (which is what currently kills Reiser4 in benchmarks).

        From: Comment 7167683 [slashdot.org]

        We allocate a "jnode" per unformatted node in the filesystem. The traversing of these jnodes consumes more CPU than performing the memcpy from user space to kernel space when doing large wri

      • Note fellas, though Bonnnie says reiser4 series is worst, reiserfs is one of the good ones, hanging on above avg in all counts!

        Me bit confused here, arent file systems which come new(like ext3 etc) supposed to be better than the older ones!?

        Definitely no. The "newer ones" mainly add journaling, and that means, at least meta-data has to be written twice on the physical medium, once into the journal, and once to the "real" place inside the FS' block-allocation and tree structure.

        E.g. reiserfs tries to s

  • these are narrow tests, not comprehensive tests (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hansreiser ( 6963 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:14AM (#7170056) Homepage
    Still, they are interesting in showing areas of performance where something is a bit amiss.

    It would be nice if exactly what they did was explained. You know, things like how you can get both the lowest total elapsed time and the worst overall score on one of the runs (because of CPU usage? ), what task was measured by each of the numbers printed, what the different settings on the different runs mean.....

    Sigh, time to go read the source code for them.

    • Still, they are interesting in showing areas of performance where something is a bit amiss.

      It would be nice if exactly what they did was explained. You know, things like how you can get both the lowest total elapsed time and the worst overall score on one of the runs (because of CPU usage? ), what task was measured by each of the numbers printed, what the different settings on the different runs mean.....

      Just looking at the table of results, it seems clear that the bonnie test has a penalty for cpu uti

      • Think of different benchmarks as being like x-ray vs. infrared photographs. Each of them gives a different insight into the subject of the photo.

        In this case, I think that this 200Mhz CPU benchmark is not highly worth optimizing for, but generally more views of a design are interesting.

        One of the things reiser4 needs to do is not have a structure per unformatted node for large files, and you can see the need for that if you look at our CPU consumption when writing a large file using dd. We'll probably
  • Are there any similiar bakeoffs that work out efficiency with regards to different file sizes?

    It would be nice if non-Linux filesystems (FATxx, NTFS etc) were also benchmarked.

  • histogram, please! (Score:2, Informative)

    by glenkim ( 412499 )
    Hey, if somebody could organize this data into histograms, it'd be a lot easier to interpret the results..
  • Juicy stories like this should be saved for Friday nights. ;)
  • ... is that, overall, ext2fs seems to perform better than ext3fs. I know journaling is an important advantage of ext3fs, but isn't it more important (for some applications) to have better performances?

    And, as many others have already pointed out, it would be nice to have a comparison of these file systems with the *BSDs FFS...

    Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated!

  • Results question (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DaEMoN128 ( 694605 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:28AM (#7170100)
    I see that JFS won in the bonnie test, but EXT2 put up one hell of a fight and won the other roundup. I didnt think EXT2 was a journaling file system. Is it fair to thow in a Non Journaling FS in a benchmark against a bunch of Journaling ones? If it isnt journaling, then I gess Im going with JFS.

    If I am wrong, please either resopond to correct me or email me.

    scythefwd@yahoo.com

    • Re:Results question (Score:5, Informative)

      by NickFortune ( 613926 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:02AM (#7170198) Homepage Journal
      Is it fair to thow in a Non Journaling FS in a benchmark against a bunch of Journaling ones?
      Yes. Of course. The ext2 numbers provide a baseline for the comparison comparison. Any journaled FS that could match it would have to be very good indeed. This isn't explicity stated anywhere - but this was posted to the kernel list. They can reasonably be expected to know the difference between ext2 and the rest. It's all data. Data is good.

      I know we're used to seeing "benchmarks" used as corporate propaganda, but let's not forget what they're supposed to be used for

    • --Ext2 is fine for speed... Until you have to fsck. On small filesystems (~500MB or less?) it's probably not that bad, but you wouldn't want to base your whole system on it. Personally I use reiserfs with 'notail' in the mount options as a good tradeoff of speed and reliability.

      --Note that resierfs v3 is the only version available right now for the stable Linux kernel; I don't even know why they bothered testing v4, because it's only in 2.6 - and alpha code, at that.
    • On the Bonnie++ benchmarks, it looked to me like ext2's biggest advantage was efficient CPU use: that's where it earned most of its green squares.

      The conclusion I drew from this was that if you don't have many spare cycles cycles, e.g. by running high-crunch applications or by running with a small CPU, ext2 has its advantages.

      But if primarily you using a system to serve files rather than cycles, or you expect to fsck often, by all means go with jfs.

  • DeFacto Standard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 ) <xptical@g3.14mail.com minus pi> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:30AM (#7170109)

    I'm not trying to be an asshole or a troll; just hear me out.

    I love Reiser. I also love Gentoo and adore Debian. Myself and another guy, Joe, are the main "linux geeks" in our computer group (cugy.net). When it came time to decide what to support at our group, we had to choose RedHat.

    If I'm in a message board or IRC channel, I need to know some things about the guy I'm helping. We reccomend RedHat because that is the biggest US company behind Linux (IBM and SUN notwithstanding). If I am teaching people about Linux, then it is to both our advantages to teach/learn about what we will see "in the field". Therefore, we only support RedHat.

    What does this have to do with anything? Well, RedHat 9 and Severn do not allow the creation of Reiser by default. I could probably boot from a Gentoo disk and format a partition to Reiser, then install RedHat to it. But, by default, only ext* is allowed.

    I love to do things that improve performance. I love testing new things on my laptop or on a offline box in our test lab. But unless RedHat offers it, it will remain in the shadows of the linux world, which is, in turn, in the shadows of the user enclave. Hell, of every important box on my network, they are either RedHat or Win2k.

    More on topic, Joe got a lot of recognition when the "internet got a lot faster". Did he upgrade the firewall? Did he install another OC-3? Maybe he reconfigured services on the proxy?

    Nope, he installed a hard drive, formatted it to Reiser, and moved the proxy cache to the reiser disk. I couldn't belive it. Just changing the filesystem caused an increase that was noticable across our network. At no cost!

    Good work, Joe.
    • Well, another big player in the Linux field, SuSE, uses Reiserfs by default.
    • In Suse 8.x the default appears to be Reiserfs, forcing you to make at least half a dozen mouseclicks extra during installation if you want a different root filesystem...
    • Just because RedHat doesn't have support for ReiserFS at install-time isn't a big deal. Do the partitioning, and when you boot-up, use the reiser-tools to format the (non-system) partitions, and change your /etc/fstab to match.

      Also, for something that's not important to keep across reboots (like a proxy cache) you should probably stick with Ext2, mount it async, and maybe re-create it upon reboots. That's what I do with /tmp, and just about any other high-throughput, non-important data.

    • "linux reiserfs" (Score:5, Informative)

      by bani ( 467531 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:53AM (#7170168)
      type "linux reiserfs" when booting the installer, and you will have access to reiserfs during redhat install.

      i've been using this method for ~2 years now.
    • Um, why would you want to put squid on a journaled file system?

      Squid is a cache of (parts of) the internet. It can be rebuilt pretty easily. For example, the next time a user goes to a page. It might cost you a fraction of a second the first time, but after that you're sweet. Journalling transitory data just adds unnecessary overhead.

      If it's quite a large cache with a number of binary objects, why don't you just mirror it up front?

      A mail spooler or news spooler that has to keep somewhat static data I'd h
      • Um, why would you want to put squid on a journaled file system?
        * Tuned to small files
        * faster

        seems useful for a cache too me,

      • Re:DeFacto Standard (Score:3, Informative)

        by warpSpeed ( 67927 )
        Um, why would you want to put squid on a journaled file system?

        For the same reason you would want to have email, or a file server, on a journaled system, recovery speed.

        I have some clients with servers (that run squid) and when they take a power hit, long enough to drain thier UPS, the last thing I want to have to do is deal with a call saying "how come the server did not come back up..." Meanwhile the fsck is still running and they are hitting the power switch trying to "reboot" the problem away b

      • Re:DeFacto Standard (Score:3, Informative)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) *
        Um, why would you want to put squid on a journaled file system?

        If you're looking to restart quickly after a power failure you can always set a partition to ignore file system checks at startup, "0 0" options in /etc/fstab. /var/spool/squid (or whatever) is on its own partition right? Perhaps on it's own disk?

        You have never waited over an hour to fsck 3 harddisks while over 100 people have no "internet".

    • Re:DeFacto Standard (Score:4, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:56AM (#7172211) Homepage Journal
      he installed a hard drive, formatted it to Reiser, and moved the proxy cache to the reiser disk. I couldn't belive it. Just changing the filesystem caused an increase that was noticable across our network. At no cost!

      He installed a hard drive. He didn't just format to reiser. The hard drive costs money.

      If the proxy cache was formerly on a disk that was also doing other things, it would have sped up no matter what filesystem he used.

      You will have to give us more information if you want your claims to have any merit.

  • Summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by samj ( 115984 ) * <samj@samj.net> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:40AM (#7170134) Homepage
    Use XFS unless you want to do lots of deletes (as they are slow and expensive) in which case ext2 is probably a better bet since the files are probably temporary (Squid caches for example).

    • Re:Summary (Score:3, Informative)

      by samj ( 115984 ) *
      And if you want to use 2.4 kernels without compiling your own then you probably want to consider the 'all rounder', JFS, as 1.1.0 (or thereabouts) has been included since 2.4.20. I have a feeling XFS modifies things which weren't to be touched until 2.6.0 so you'll need a custom kernel for it. While some vendors ship 2.4 kernels with XFS support, I only really care about debian and it only ships the patch.

  • Note on ext3 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by moZer ( 83729 )
    Now, before everyone goes "I knew it! ext3 sux!!!!111!!1", remember that the default mode for ext3 is ordered, and not journal. Compare the numbers for ext3_ordered and ext3_writeback with reiser/xfs/jfs, and you'll see that ext3 is very very close in most cases.

  • Here's my $699 now. (Score:3, Funny)

    by clusterix ( 606570 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @05:54AM (#7170170)
    Wow, it looks like SCO has the best filesystems for Linux with JFS and XFS.

  • Where's the deviation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:07AM (#7170211)
    Filesystem benchmarks can be remarkably inconsistent. These tables do not display average difference between runs. Usually this means that the methodology used to do the benchmarking is lax, and thus, untrustworthy.

    For example, consider that harddrives do their own error correction. Depending on the location of marginal blocks on the media, different file systems can score dramatically for no other reason than the drive's re-mapping or error correction logic is kicking in at a bad point. Alignment of data can also be a factor in performace which depending on the formatting procedure may be completely random when compared to the file system sitting on top of it.
    For these reasons and a host of others, it is not reliable to do filesystem performance comparison on a single machine.
    Bottom line is that there is a good chance that these data are not fair representations of the relative merits of each filesystem.

  • Odd (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ThoreauHD ( 213527 )
    Why do the benchmarks seem to be completely opposed to the other. The bonnie says reiser4 is faster, and the iozone says jfs is faster, and reiser is the slowest. This isn't making a great deal of sense to me.

  • Ext3 (Score:4, Informative)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:14AM (#7170231) Homepage
    Well ext3 might suck but when you've only got a resuce system that can read ext2 it can really save your neck. I would be intrested to see what is best in terms of stability though..

    Rus

    • Re:Ext3 (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dr.Flake ( 601029 )
      Exactly,

      I'm also very interested in the ease and ability to repair (or auto-heal) a corrupted file system after a hard crash.

      Also, simple undelete would also be on my wish list. just in case.

      Anyone here who's got those features ready?

    • Re:Ext3 (Score:3, Informative)

      by srussell ( 39342 )
      Augh. I can't stand it any more.

      I had ext3 on my wife's laptop for a while, and it failed twice. By "fail", I mean that, due to Linux crashes, the filesystem had errors that had to be recovered by hand. By "fail", I mean actual, significant data loss.

      When I got my new laptop (from QliLinuxPC), they formatted the HD into one big partition (well, one for /boot and one for /), and formatted those as ext3. I didn't switch to ReiserFS, because QliLinuxPC said they'd had good luck with ext3. In the past

  • Is this realistic? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nemaispuke ( 624303 )
    Is it me, or is there a lack of information about the machine the tests were run on such as why is almost all of the memory used up? Second, a system with a single disk and swap is in use? What was this guy trying to test anyhow? All this tests is basically a typical Linux box with a single drive. I wouldn't base any decision to go from one filesystem to another based on these tests!
    • There is a link to information about the machine. However, the rest of your comment still holds.
    • All this tests is basically a typical Linux box with a single drive. I wouldn't base any decision to go from one filesystem to another based on these tests!

      So you're saying that you don't want to see tests based on typical hardware? I can't think of anything better to test.

      TWW

      • I think you are missing the point. In any test (especially one that is going to come in under scrutiny) all information about the target for the test should be published. There is no information about the OS (other than its Linux), what running software, what tweaks have been applied, etc. Based on what little information is provided, I doubt if anyone could duplicate the results. And the information should be available so that it can be tested independently. Everybody complains about benchmarks, but few a

  • Can't wait for Novell Storage System on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thehunger ( 549253 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:17AM (#7170239)
    Personally, I'm happy to wait for yet another file system: Novell Storage System. It certainly is feature packed. Now before you all start banging on me, remember that Novell for years was the king of file system services. Just some of the features:
    • Compression and fast decompression
    • Hiearchical storage system integration
    • Advanced access control model, with granular access control with inheritance and inheritance filters
    • Copy on Write
    • File system snapshot
    • Journaling
    • Transaction tracking
    • DFS, Junctions and yes! symbolic links!
    • Disk, directory and user level quotas
    • Fast mount and repair times
    • Name spaces for MAC, NFS, NCP
    • Native CIFS, NFS, AFP and WebDAV protocol support
    • Clustering support
    • Software mirroring and RAID0 striping
    • Fast! State of the art caching and read-ahead algorithms
    • Low memory requirements
    • Scalable: 64-bit, 8 terabyte sizes, pooling etc

    I could go on... About the only thing it is missing is encryption. Of course it remains to be seen whether the port to Linux will be successful, and whether Novell has the sense to make it open source.

    • Re:Can't wait for Novell Storage System on Linux (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You forgot one thing. As an enterprise filesystem Novell was absolutely bulletproof long before RAID systems were in vogue. It took me awhile to even figure out why we needed one after years of running Novell as our main storage controller (flawlessly).

      Novell could give *nix systems windows like (don't bash if you don't know) fine granularity over user access at the enterprise level along with true enterprise scaling. Again, if you have never worked in a cross enterprise environment, don't start bashing
    • Copy on Write and directory quotas are stuff I'd really like to see in Linux filesystems. The combination of hardlinks and directory quotas is however very tricky, any pointers to implementations that made this work in the right way?

  • This is kinda weird (Score:2, Interesting)

    by insomaniac ( 469016 )
    I used to have a gentoo install with a JFS partition for the system on my laptop. The laptop ran so slow that I reinstalled the whole thing with reiserfs, now it runs so much faster, so how could JFS come in so high on the benchmarks while my experience has been that its dog slow?

  • Irrelevant numbers (Score:2, Informative)

    by krorvik ( 415797 )
    These benchmarks were performed on relatively old hardware, with a slow cpu and a disk only running UDMA2. And, as others have already pointed out, the data are statistically not really reliable.

    Myself, I'd be much more interested in seeing numbers made on a setup more like my own.

    Static benchmarks are never good for deciding "which is best".

    • These [oregonstate.edu] benchmarks, by the guys who host most of Gentoo, were done on a dual 2.8Ghz P4 Xeon's, 2Gb of RAM machine (Dell PowerEdge 2650) and (AFAICS) reach broadly similar conclusions - 'best' depends on your usage, but JFS is pretty good, reiser uses a lot of CPU etc.

  • there is more to a filesystem that speed. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by msh104 ( 620136 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:47AM (#7170330)
    every filesystem has its own purpose, for example reiser4 has atomic operations, database like capabilities, journalizing and metadata. now how are you going to say that ext2 is better because it performed better in brenchmark xyz. this is just the same thing as people buying a graphics card because it scored 1 or 2 fps more then an other card but forget that the other card has a build in mpeg2 or for the same price.

  • Sort of on topic... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blixel ( 158224 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:55AM (#7170352)
    I have a new 200GB hard-drive on the way that will be here any day now. I plan on using this new drive as a storage drive for music, digital camera images, documents, bookmarks, settings, game save data, e-mail messages, backup data, and so on. If WinXP or Linux irreparably crashes on me, this storage drive (and it's mirrored backup) will contain all the data I care about.

    I have two different physical drives in this machine now and I dual boot between them. Linux (for just about everything I do) and then WinXP (for things that absolutely require Windows.)

    The new drive I'm getting will be hooked up to my machine externally via Firewire. (I don't need help with the external setup. I already have another drive hooked up this way and it works just fine.)

    Now my question is - what is the best file system to use for compatibility between Windows XP and Linux. I require full read/write access to this drive whether I'm in Linux or WinXP. I know NTFS is out. (Even with the 2.6 kernel, write support from Linux to an NTFS partition is limited [can't create new files or directories] and Linux NTFS writing is not considered completely safe.)

    I'm guessing VFAT is my only option but I thought I would ask around first.

    I do have another machine laying around but I don't want to set it up as an NFS/Samba server for a few different reasons. #1. I don't want to leave the machine on 24/7. #2. I don't want to tie up that machine. I like experimenting with new things so if I turned that machine into a full time server, I wouldn't have a test bed machine any more. #3. I don't like NFS.

    I have also thought about one of those Network Area Storage systems. Maybe someday, but at this point in time that idea is out too.

    Does anyone have any experience with this? What solutions have you come up with?

    • Re:Sort of on topic... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jameth ( 664111 )
      If you can afford a little extra partitions, try reiserFS. Although it is not natively a part of windows, there are tools which let you use it. This means you cannot install windows on it, but you could get read-write access with it.

      Back when I still dual-booted, I had this layout:

      5 gig NTFS WindowsXP partition
      5 gig XFS Slackware partition
      1 gig swap parition
      45 gig reiserFS shared storage partition

      This also made me feel a lot safer in using the systems: Neither ever mounted the other system's Root directo

    • Re:Sort of on topic... (Score:4, Informative)

      by angle_mark ( 472962 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @08:50AM (#7170950)

      There are some free and some commercial products which can offer full read/write + journalling access for ext3 partitions from Windows. I'd definitely recommend you pick ext3 over fat32.

      Some examples..

      Free: Explore2fs [swin.edu.au] allows you to read ext2 and ext3. Limited write support is available.

      Commercial: Ext2FS Anywhere [ext2fs-anywhere.com] don't let the name put you off as it has full read/write support for ext2, ext3 and I think reiserFS is supported now too.

  • Worth Noting (Score:4, Informative)

    by MajroMax ( 112652 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @07:51AM (#7170572)
    It's worth noting here that the benchmarks were all run on files >= 1GB, if I'm reading the table correctly; this stresses the raw IO of the system, and doesn't really take into account the differences in tree-structure between the filesystems.

    As for complaints about Reiser's performance -- last I heard, it was more optimized for many small files -- precisely the domain that this thing didn't test.

  • Some suggestions for future tests (Score:3, Informative)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @08:57AM (#7170997) Homepage
    These numbers are great, but only tell us a little about reliability or "real world" performance. When I did testing on these file system I used all the benchmarks here, plus a benchmark called postmark [netapp.com]. This benchmark utility was released into the public domain by Net App [netapp.com] and has to be one of the better "real world" benchmark suites.

    The problem that we had with JFS during testing is that we had kernel panic with very large files. Thus we chose XFS - which has done an excellent job. I'm sure glad that the XFS file system has been merged into the 2.6 kernel, no more patching the 2.4's!

    For more benchmarks on other file systems using postmark check out This [shub-internet.org]

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