Finally, Reiser4 Benchmarks Against EXT4 & Btrfs

Btrfs results for SQLite were not available since it takes an immense amount of time to currently run this test atop the Oracle-sponsored file-system. The fastest file-system in this 12,500 insertion SQLite test was actually ReiserFS, the original Hans Reiser file-system. ReiserFS pulled moderately in front of the popular EXT4 file-system. Reiser4 took twice as long to complete this test as EXT4, but still not as long as it would take Btrfs to complete this database test. Sadly, our PostgreSQL test crashes atop Reiser4 so this is our only database test in this article.

Turning to Compile Bench, which is a tool written by Chris Mason during the development of Btrfs, the Reiser4 file-system was the winner! Reiser4 took a strong performance lead over both EXT4 and Btrfs! ReiserFS was by far the slowest file-system, but Reiser4 came out nearly six times faster than its predecessor did. In this test Reiser4 was over 60% faster than EXT4.

With the compile test in Compile Bench, Btrfs was the winner by a significant difference, but Reiser4 continued to displace EXT4 and was a few megabytes per second faster than the file-system that's used by default in most of the recent Linux distributions. Reiser4 was more than twice as fast as ReiserFS.

With the read compiled tree test, Reiser4 had another win and was twice as fast as EXT4 with this very fast solid-state drive from OCZ. It also outpaced Btrfs by quite a lot, which was the second fastest file-system.