Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux

Starting with the Gzip compression test, both EXT4 and Btrfs were noticeably faster than UFS+J and UFS+S. The two tested UFS configurations both took 27 seconds to compress a 2GB file while EXT4 and Btrfs both took just 18 seconds atop the same hardware. Meanwhile, the ZFS file-system was actually the slowest with a time of 34 seconds.

With the initial create test in the compile benchmark, the performance of ZFS was over 3.5x faster than the common BSD UFS+J/UFS+S file-systems. However, the performance of ZFS on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 8.1 fell slightly short of the Linux file-system performance. EXT4 had the best speed at 58MB/s while Btrfs came in slightly behind that at 52MB/s and then ZFS came in at 46MB/s.

When running PostMark, ZFS came out far ahead of the UFS file-systems being more than ten times faster than UFS+S and more than four times faster than UFS+J. However, EXT4 on Linux was four times faster than ZFS v14 on BSD. Btrfs was three times faster than ZFS.