Btrfs File-System Tuning On Linux 3.7

Earlier this week I posted new Reiser4 file-system benchmarks that compared the non-mainline file-system against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Continuing in the Linux file-system performance theme, in this article are more Btrfs benchmarks from that same system but when using the early Linux 3.7 development kernel and trying out different Btrfs mount/tuning options.

This article provides a look at the Btrfs performance with the stock file-system mount options compared to other mount options that are slated to have an impact on the disk performance. The tested options from the Btrfs Linux system included nodatacow, nobarrier, compress=zlib, compress=lzo, discard, nospace_cache, clear_cache, inode_cache, and noatime. The Btrfs partition was re-formatted each time between switching the mount options under test.

For those unfamiliar with the Btrfs mount options, each of them are described in detail from this Btrfs Kernel.org Wiki page that covers all of the mount options. A pre-RC1 version of the Linux 3.7 kernel was used following the Btrfs feature pull.