EXT4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Benchmarks

Starting with the Parallel BZIP2 Compression test profile to measure how long it takes to compress a 2GB sample file to PBZIP2 format, XFS was the fastest file-system. There was not a significant difference between the XFS and EXT3 file-systems, albeit the prior was in first, but they were faster than the three new file-systems: EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2. Btrfs was the slowest, but these margins were small.

The EXT4 file-system was the fastest at encrypting a sample file using the Java-based Bork encryption program, but immediately behind that was Btrfs. The older file-systems, XFS and EXT3, were slower than EXT4/Btrfs, but NILFS2 was much slower with this test profile. It took 34 seconds for the file to be encrypted on the SATA disk here using EXT4 and Btrfs, but with NILFS2 took 57 seconds!

With the SQLite test profile to measure how long it takes to perform 12,500 insertions using this lightweight SQL database, EXT3 and NILFS2 were the clear winner. It took 20 seconds for this database test to complete under EXT3, 34 seconds under NILFS2, but 870 seconds for EXT4! XFS was at 1312 seconds and Btrfs was at 1472 seconds! These results are a bit shocking, but the Phoronix Test Suite does run these tests multiple times to ensure accuracy and statistical significance. Going back to our mass kernel benchmarking we have found regressions in some kernel releases when it came to the SQLite performance, but it looks like the file-system may play a larger role in how this database application performs. Programs such as Mozilla Firefox and Adobe programs use SQLite.