Btrfs On Ubuntu Is Running Well

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Btrfs On Ubuntu Is Running Well

For those curious about first-hand stories of using Btrfs in a production environment, Alan Pope of Canonical has written about his positive experiences in running Btrfs on a production server for more than the past year...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ1MTU

[Ericg]

Happily using BTRFS for more than the last year

[kernelOfTruth]

with most recent patches on the ML it now has become the fastest filesystem on linux I have used so far

seems like they're really speeding up development pace - hopefully integrity-wise they also keep on improving at that pace - will be the best then

[macemoneta]

We've been running btrfs on all our systems for about 14 months now. Single drive, btrfs raid0, and btrfs raid1. We haven't lost a file. I trust btrfs more than ext4 at this point. Do run the latest upstream kernel and btrfs-progs if you are going to use it, to stay ahead of any issues.

[ninez]

with most recent patches on the ML it now has become the fastest filesystem on linux I have used so far

Benchmarks? (and/or links to specific patches?) ... I ask because that is a bold statement to make (fastest filesystem) without some sort of data to support what you are saying. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but the last time that i checked Btrfs still was pretty slow in a lot of workloads and when i used it in January in one machine -> i was less than impressed by it's 'speed' and certainly not faster than ext4, at that time. (ie: i ditched btrfs in favor of ext4). Then, of course i have seen more recent benchmarks comparing ext4 to btrfs (even a few days ago on Phoronix) and i didn't get the impresion that all of a sudden; btrfs is the fastest filesystem...

* but don't get me wrong, i would love to see btrfs replace ext4, if/when it's ready to be the (my?) default filesystem, over ext4.

cheerz

[xeekei]

I hope Btrfs will pick up some speed soon, and get all planned features stable. We need it, the filesystem is one of Linux's weak spots. The BSD-guys are laughing at us.

[kernelOfTruth]

Benchmarks? (and/or links to specific patches?) ... I ask because that is a bold statement to make (fastest filesystem) without some sort of data to support what you are saying. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but the last time that i checked Btrfs still was pretty slow in a lot of workloads and when i used it in January in one machine -> i was less than impressed by it's 'speed' and certainly not faster than ext4, at that time. (ie: i ditched btrfs in favor of ext4). Then, of course i have seen more recent benchmarks comparing ext4 to btrfs (even a few days ago on Phoronix) and i didn't get the impresion that all of a sudden; btrfs is the fastest filesystem...

* but don't get me wrong, i would love to see btrfs replace ext4, if/when it's ready to be the (my?) default filesystem, over ext4.

cheerz

in this case I don't care about benchmarks

it's a speedup during every usage:

e.g. browsing folders with lots of files (all different kinds of files) via nemo/nautilus - it's almost suddenly there whereas before it took several seconds to load,

launching & using virtual machines (virtualbox), launching apps, etc. etc.


take all of this with a grain of salt (say: it's not only due to btrfs) since I added lots of other patches to cut down latency as low as possible (BFS, adaptive CFQ low-latency behavior, (v2) mm: improve page aging fairness between zones_nodes , and others)

kernel base is 3.10 - so it's basically a 3.10 custom fork

[ninez]

in this case I don't care about benchmarks

it's a speedup during every usage:

e.g. browsing folders with lots of files (all different kinds of files) via nemo/nautilus - it's almost suddenly there whereas before it took several seconds to load,

launching & using virtual machines (virtualbox), launching apps, etc. etc.

Ah, okay. I wasn't bugging you for benchmarks out of disbelief or anything, i just (personally) like seeing hard numbers too, when possible...

take all of this with a grain of salt (say: it's not only due to btrfs) since I added lots of other patches to cut down latency as low as possible (BFS, adaptive CFQ low-latency behavior, (v2) mm: improve page aging fairness between zones_nodes , and others)

kernel base is 3.10 - so it's basically a 3.10 custom fork

do you care to pass on any of these patches? (excluding BFS - since i use a custom build of linux-rt, which is incompatible / i need CFS). I'm always looking for new patches to add to my queue and/or to test/experiment with... the mm paging stuff may be of interest and I'm curious about these "others". (you could just pastebin them?)...

thx

[Brane215]

I don't see any key advantega of btrfs over ext4 that would make me switch now.

And it is not clear how can it scale better than existing mdraid+lvm solutions.

I run my RAID-5/6 arrays for quite some time without much trouble. During that time i restripped and expanded them a few times, without bad consequnces.

Yes, md can be a bitch, but that just means one has to get to know it intimately so he can avoid its "problematic" sides.

One generally wants to know how data is being stored and how much redundancy there is and how is it paid for.

With RAID-5 i know that i have one equivalent of one drive for checksums. So I can lose one up to one drive. With current striping and CPU+ board combo I use, I have 200+MB/s linear read performance, which is more than enough for a server I accese through GiG-e. With new HW ( kaveri-based) this will jump dramatically.

I also know that I have to pay some time of reduced performace when restriping and/or growing. In return, I have high bandwidth of all drives available for all data. For me, RAID-1 or RAID-10 is simply not enough.

OTOH, embeded crypto or signature check would really come handy, so one wouldn't have to encrypt whole partition. Alas, Btrfs doesn't offer that.

[pankkake]

I don't see any key advantega of btrfs over ext4 that would make me switch now.

Compression, snapshots.