Running The Native ZFS Linux Kernel Module, Plus Benchmarks

When beginning with the Apache web server benchmark, the KQ Infotech ZFS beta performance is not anything exciting. In fact, aside from the ZFS-FUSE performance, the KQ Infotech ZFS beta was the slowest file-system and measurably behind that of EXT4, Btrfs, and EXFS. The best performance with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel was tied between EXT4 and XFS while Btrfs was right behind. With the Linux 2.6.37 kernel, the XFS file-system is right in front of EXT4. This native ZFS module was notably faster than the ZFS-FUSE module due to not experiencing the overhead associated with running the file-system in user-space rather than kernel-space.

When it comes to the SQLite performance, the ZFS file-system was actually faster than the Btrfs file-system by a notable margin, but with SQLite database transactions is one of the areas where Btrfs continues to struggle. The EXT4 file-system was about 14% faster than the native ZFS module on the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. The XFS file-system, however, was much faster than all of the other file-systems. In this test we also have a look at the OpenIndiana b147 performance and it was by far the fastest over any file-system on Linux with a time of 11 seconds with its ZFS implementation compared to 25 seconds for ZFS on Linux.

With the compile bench test, the native ZFS Linux file-system outdid the XFS file-system and obviously the ZFS-FUSE file-system, but EXT4 and Btrfs were dramatically faster than ZFS. OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris with ZFS continued to be measurably faster than Ubuntu with ZFS: 67 MB/s vs. 100 MB/s.