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Real World Benchmarks Of The EXT4 File-System

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  • #11
    CPU Usage

    Has anyone tested CPU usage? Lower CPU usage = less wakeups = better battery life, right?

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    • #12
      Originally posted by [Knuckles] View Post
      It would be interesting to see tests with many small files. I once used XFS for my root filesystem and performance was horrible to do things like unpack sources and remove directories with many files, my system would just freeze while XFS was thrashing away at the disk.

      It's all nice and dandy with multi-gb files, when all those caches and delayed allocations do a great job, but I learned my lesson with XFS, and now use ext3 everywhere.

      I also agree that boot time and application load times are important, although I guess both may be hard to measure with the PTS.
      XFS is easily tweaked to cure that.

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      • #13
        Hi,

        Would we see any upgrade tool to migrate from ext3 to ext4, as like a kind of "partition magic" ?
        I wouldn't have to refomat my drive only for migrating from ext3 to ext4.

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        • #14
          Thanks Michael. Those tests seems to be far more objective then previous. The title is correct in my opinion

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          • #15
            JFS

            If this test is done again, could you include JFS also? JFS is a strong contender for best Linux filesystem at the moment.

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            • #16
              In the beginning sentence of the article, it is stated that distributions will be using EXT4 as an interim step.

              Does that mean distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora desktop editions will be skipping the use of EXT4 altogether? I thought Btrfs is more suitable for database storage applications and such.

              Please enlighten the poor soul.

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              • #17
                Does that mean distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora desktop editions will be skipping the use of EXT4 altogether? I thought Btrfs is more suitable for database storage applications and such.
                Ext4, even though it's a substantial incremental improvement, is still based on the well proven Ext3 file system. Some of the reason why Ext3 doesn't look good in a lot of benchmarks vs things like XFS and ReiserFS is because Ext3 is designed to be a robust file system for today's cheap and unreliable commodity-based servers and workstations.

                Look at this way: Given what I know about Linux file systems, personal experiences, and second-hand accounts; I wouldn't want to run Reiser or XFS on a server without battery cache on the RAID card AND a UPS or on a laptop or desktop that is prone to errors like kernel oops and power fluctuations. Actually XFS is useful, but I'd never use Reiserfs for anything important. v4 is untested, and v3 is just flaky and unsupported.

                So people will use Ext4 because it's based on proven code.

                Btrfs, despite all it's advancements and new features, is going to take a long time to get acceptance for anybody doing anything very serious. You just can't trust a file system for anything critical that hasn't had a year or two of serious usage by a wide audience.

                Unfortunately the advancements in disk capacity and the relatively lack of progress in increasing disks speeds have obsoleted Ext3. It now takes exponentially longer and longer to recover file systems and run a fsck. And Ext3 doesn't behave well when you get file systems upwards to several TBs. Ext4 will allow enterprises to use Linux as a storage OS until Btrfs is production ready.

                Linux, right now, because of it's lack of very good logical volume management and the limitations of Ext3 isn't nearly as popular as it should be for the storage arena.

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                • #18
                  Disappointing...

                  Most of those tests are kind of ridiculous. There's especially no point in testing a video game; any changes in fps would be negligible here. You load the data from disk once, it gets cached into memory, and that's the end of it. Maybe the occasional disk activity here and there with logs and a new data file or two, but it's nothing. Encryption, compression, encoding, etc., are CPU intensive operations. They're rather pointless too.k


                  Real-world benchmarks are great and all, but that doesn't mean you just pick a random program and time it. Find something IO-intensive if you don't want to run a purely IO-based benchmark. Boot times for example.

                  Also, without reporting the error, your numbers are misleading and dishonest. It's great that you've averaged three runs, but we need to know how consistent the runs were. I have a suspicion that the error in the games benchmarks far outweigh the differences between the filesystems, given how much disk io games do. (Virtually none. Disks accesses slow, and game developers know to avoid them like the plague.)

                  Be more careful in your conclusions and, if nothing else, give us reason to trust them.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by drag View Post
                    Ext4, even though it's a substantial incremental improvement, is still based on the well proven Ext3 file system. Some of the reason why Ext3 doesn't look good in a lot of benchmarks vs things like XFS and ReiserFS is because Ext3 is designed to be a robust file system for today's cheap and unreliable commodity-based servers and workstations.
                    Thanks for the explanation, Drag. I guess it seems Ext4 is more mature than Btrfs for the time being.

                    I would like to see the benchmarks of Btrfs in the near future. I believe it is at least ready for benchmarking.

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                    • #20
                      I was hoping the Phoronix team would take recommendations when benchmarking file systems - I wrote a post about it more than once:
                      Discussion & collaboration on the Phoronix Test Suite software and specification.


                      I don't really understand the Phoronix process; is this purposefully a pseudo-technical publicity stunt?

                      I was just hoping that you guys would want to take on something more in depth... Just this once. One in depth article is way more useful to your readers than ten of whatever you call these.

                      Sorry for the harsh words and good luck.

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