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Linux 3.3 Kernel: Btrfs vs. EXT4

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  • #31
    Originally posted by fackamato View Post
    Thanks. I can't wait for SSDs to become good and usable.
    That behaviour is specific to Sandforce controllers though, not every SSD does that.

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    • #32
      or deduplication - the controller does that already. You have 3000 write cycles with 34nm flash chips. 25 and 20nm have a lot less.

      A good controller with room to spare can use that and give you years of lifetimes. But with sf if you compress your stuff you loose a lot of this. Don't use compression with sandforce.

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      • #33
        A good controller with room to spare can use that and give you years of lifetimes. But with sf if you compress your stuff you loose a lot of this. Don't use compression with sandforce.
        Well then WTF is sandforce good for?

        JPEG images = Compressed.
        Movies/Videos/Flash = Compressed
        OpenOffice Documents = Compressed

        etc etc.

        90% of all the data that you give a shit about storing on a file system is going to be compressed.

        And Intel/You are/is telling us that we shouldn't use compression? What sort of crap is that?

        It does not make any sense. Having a drive that tries to outguess the operating system on stuff like this is a anti-feature. It's undesirable.

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        • #34
          if everything is compressed anyway, then why use filesystem compression?

          But you are wrong - most stuff on your disk is not compressed. Your mail database/maildir/mbox is not compressed. config files are not compressed, binaries are not compressed, libs are not compressed etc pp.

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          • #35
            if everything is compressed anyway, then why use filesystem compression?
            Because you have a unique set of circumstances were compression actually helps you. Which is not going to be typical for most desktop users or servers.

            Why don't you think that every file system supports compression? Why do you think that even when compression is available it's off by default? If it was such a slamdunk wonderful thing then it would be on by default for everything. This sort of stuff isn't new, you know. I had file system compression back when I used DOS 6.0..



            Generally speaking while compression can improve read/write speeds for large uncompressed files very well it harms random access. And on most systems random access to uncompressed files is going to be more important then raw read/write speeds. Especially for desktop performance.

            This is why compression looks so good in benchmarks, but it isn't a great thing in practice for every situation. Benchmarks tend to use large files with repetitive data that is easily compressed. If they used random data then it would make compression look lousy.

            But you are wrong - most stuff on your disk is not compressed.
            No, I am right because 'most stuff' is compressed. My operating system takes up about 2-4GB. Out of that...

            configs in /etc ...

            # du -sh /etc/
            11M /etc/

            executable program binaries...

            # du -sh /bin /usr/bin/ /usr/*/bin/
            4.9M /bin
            165M /usr/bin/
            0 /usr/local/bin/


            Library (*.so) files.
            # echo $(($(find /lib /usr/ -type f -name *.so |xargs du -k |cut -f1|while read i ; do size=$(($size + $i)) ; echo $size ;done |tail -n1) / 1024))M
            179M

            Compare that to mp3 files...

            # echo $(($(find / -type f -name *.mp3 -print0 |xargs -0 du -k |cut -f1|while read i ; do size=$(($size + $i)) ; echo $size ;done |tail -n1) / 1024))M
            1691M

            or even jpgs:

            # echo $(($(find / -type f -name *.jpg -print0 |xargs -0 du -k |cut -f1|while read i ; do size=$(($size + $i)) ; echo $size ;done |tail -n1) / 1024))M
            1012M

            Here is even webm files, mostly downloaded from youtube for safe keeping:
            # echo $(($(find / -type f -name *.webm -print0 |xargs -0 du -k |cut -f1|while read i ; do size=$(($size + $i)) ; echo $size ;done |tail -n1) / 1024))M
            1929M

            Now in my home directory I easily have about 2GB in my ~/Download directory. Then in my cache files for my browsers I have a few hundred meg alone. All that stuff is using compression. With one video game, say startcraft II, I have to download many multiple GB of data all of which is compressed. Even after installed to my wine directory all but a few megs is going to be compressed. A single HD movie is going to be several times larger then all the uncompressed text files in my system.

            Even a single OpenOffice document file can easily use up more disk space then all the uncompressed binaries or library files on my system if it's a fairly complex one, and those formats use compression also.

            .....................


            Which goes back to the my point that if Intel says not to use compression with their drives they are smoking crack. Either Intel is cranking out shitty designs whose main purpose is to look good in benchmarks, or some people are making claims about Intel's drives that are false.
            Last edited by drag; 04 March 2012, 05:45 PM.

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            • #36
              when I used reiser4 I had compression on. Reiser4 tests if a file is compressible btw before committing so it does not try to compress stuff it can't compress anymore.

              And the advantages were huge.. /var /, even /home or /mnt/movies benefittet from it.

              So - most stuff is compressible - but and it is a nice feature for an fs - on a harddisk. Not for a fs on a sandforce ssd.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by AnonymousCoward View Post
                That behaviour is specific to Sandforce controllers though, not every SSD does that.
                Ignore SF for now. If you can, grab the newish Samsungs. They have the best all around performance, and are much more load independent based upon my research.
                Still, if it's the space saving due to compression you are interested in, grab some big platter drives and run a fs that supports compression. Much more cost efficient.

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                • #38
                  Peformance optimizations for mirrors

                  I wonder if Btrfs in mirror configuration will issue requests to both drives simultaneously. After all, the information resides on two (or more but I assume just two) places so it would be of benefit to interleave the reads from the mirrors. With RAID 0 you get that automatically due to its nature and the writes also benefit from it. For a mirrored system only reads can be optimized but it should still yield better overall performance.

                  I don't know if the other RAID implementations for Linux (or any other OS) do it. But it seems like an obvious optimization. Anyone has any thoughts on that?

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by kobblestown View Post
                    I wonder if Btrfs in mirror configuration will issue requests to both drives simultaneously. After all, the information resides on two (or more but I assume just two) places so it would be of benefit to interleave the reads from the mirrors. With RAID 0 you get that automatically due to its nature and the writes also benefit from it. For a mirrored system only reads can be optimized but it should still yield better overall performance.

                    I don't know if the other RAID implementations for Linux (or any other OS) do it. But it seems like an obvious optimization. Anyone has any thoughts on that?
                    mdadm

                    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-sta...nux_MD_RAID_10

                    Code:
                    The driver also supports a "far" layout where all the drives are divided into f sections. All the chunks are repeated in each section but offset by one device. For example, f2 layouts on 2-, 3-, and 4-drive arrays would look like:
                    
                    2 drives             3 drives             4 drives
                    --------             --------------       --------------------
                    A1  A2               A1   A2   A3         A1   A2   A3   A4
                    A3  A4               A4   A5   A6         A5   A6   A7   A8
                    A5  A6               A7   A8   A9         A9   A10  A11  A12
                    ..  ..               ..   ..   ..         ..   ..   ..   ..
                    A2  A1               A3   A1   A2         A4   A1   A2   A3
                    A4  A3               A6   A4   A5         A8   A5   A6   A7
                    A6  A5               A9   A7   A8         A12  A9   A10  A11
                    ..  ..               ..   ..   ..         ..   ..   ..   ..
                    This is designed for striping performance of a mirrored array; sequential reads can be striped, as in RAID-0, random reads are somewhat faster (maybe 10-20 % due to using the faster outer disk sectors, and smaller average seek times), and sequential and random writes offer about equal performance to other mirrored raids. The layout performs well for systems where reads are more frequent than writes, which is common. The first 1/f of each drive is a standard RAID-0 array. This offers striping performance on a mirrored set of only 2 drives.

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                    • #40
                      xfs?

                      The benchmark is missing XFS, which is the sane default pick of a fs for Linux.

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