Real World Benchmarks Of The EXT4 File-System

To see what difference the file-system makes when encoding media files, we had used LAME for WAV to MP3 conversion and FFmpeg for AVI to NTSC VCD. When encoding our sample WAV file using LAME, all four file-systems took 52 seconds with first and last place being just a fifth of a second difference.

While the LAME results were incredibly close, there was a greater spread when looking at our FFmpeg numbers. Here the fastest file-system was EXT3, which came out to be about 6% faster than EXT4. ReiserFS had finished with a close second followed by XFS in third.

If you are interested in encrypting files with GnuPG, the fastest 2GB file encryption occurred with EXT3 and XFS in a close second. This was followed by ReiserFS and then EXT4.