Real World Benchmarks of the ext4 File System
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Dec 2008 20:42 UTC, submitted by Michael
Benchmarks The choice of filesystems on Linux is vast, but most people will stick with their respective distributions' default choices, which will most likely be ext3, but you're free to use ReiserFS, XFS, or something else completely if you so desire. Things are about to change though, with btrfs just around the corner. To bridge the gap between now and btfrs, ext3 has been updated to ext4, which adds some interesting features like extents, which are already in use in most other popular file systems. Phoronix decided it was time to do some performance checking on ext4.
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abraxas
Member since:
2005-07-07

Using the defaults for these benchmarks is reasonable and beneficial. One significant problem I've noticed with FOSS is a tendency to ship with really sucky defaults. Setting proper defaults is not given a high priority because FOSS users are assumed to be smart enough to modify them. (Hi PostgreSQL! Glad you're doing better now!) If XFS ships with poor default settings the devs deserve to be beaten over the head with benchmark losses until they notice the problem.


XFS doesn't ship with poor default settings. It ships with settings that aren't optimal for a desktop system but that's because it is used often for large disk arrays. That doesn't mean it isn't a good desktop file system also but distributions tend to use ext3 as the default filesystem and pretty much ignore all other filesystems. It would be trivial to export optimized desktop settings during install but there aren't many distributions that even offer XFS as an option during install.

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