EXT4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Benchmarks

With NetApp's PostMark benchmark ran through the Phoronix Test Suite, the EXT4 file-system had the most transactions per second followed by Btrfs and then EXT3. The EXT4 file-system had sustained 2777 transactions per second, there was 1785 transactions per second on average with Btrfs, but only 357 transactions per second with NILFS2. While NILFS2 was far behind the other new Linux file-systems, XFS was just behind that with a speed of 344 transactions per second.

Ending out our testing we used BlogBench to simulate the web server load of what would normally be experienced by a server hosting a blog. Btrfs was in first, just behind that was EXT4 followed by EXT3 and then NILFS2, and lastly was XFS.

We are not done with our EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. NILFS2 file-system testing as we still have to run these new file-systems on a solid state disk, but as it stands right now, EXT4 is in much better shape when it comes to performance compared to Btrfs and NILFS2. However, EXT4 is just an incremental upgrade over EXT3 where as Btrfs and NILFS2 are completely original and their on-disk formats are not necessarily finalized. Additionally, all testing was done on each of the file-systems with their stock mount settings and the default Ubuntu Linux settings. Give it a few more kernel releases and we will likely see better performance out of NILFS2 and Btrfs. While these newer file-systems each have their own set of feature advantages, even XFS and EXT3 performed better than them in a few of the test profiles. Those interested in running their own Linux file-system comparisons can do so using the Phoronix Test Suite.