EXT4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Benchmarks

When carrying out more database benchmarking, but this time with PostgreSQL, XFS and Btrfs were too slow to even complete this test, even when it had been running for more than an hour for a single run. Between EXT3, EXT4, and NILFS2, the fastest file-system was EXT3 and then its successor, EXT4, was slightly behind that. Far behind the position of EXT4 were NILFS2 and then Btrfs and XFS.

When it came to running Apache and seeing how many requests per second could be sustained over this HTTP server on the local host of a static HTML web-page, the performance was fairly close between the five tested file-systems. Btrfs was the slowest, but by a small margin, while in first was XFS, also by a slim margin. Of the three newer file-systems, EXT4 was the fastest.

With the 2GB write performance using IOzone, EXT4 was the fastest at 131MB/s. In second was EXT3 with a speed of 107MB/s and then XFS at 105MB/s, Btrfs at 89MB/s, and lastly was NILFS2 at 68MB/s. EXT4 was nearly twice as fast as the NILFS2 file-system.