HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 Benchmarks On DragonFlyBSD 5.6

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0.

With a 120GB Toshiba NVMe SSD on an Intel Core i7 8700K system, I ran some benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0 freshly installed with HAMMER2 and then again when returning to the original HAMMER file-system that remains available via its installer. No other changes were made to the setup during testing.

All of the benchmarks were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


Within the real-world PostgreSQL database server benchmarks, HAMMER2 is faster than HAMMER. In particular, the write performance is much better on this new version of HAMMER under development the past several years.


The BlogBench workload was also seeing much better performance.

In simple workloads like Git on the GTK source repository, the performance didn't end up being measurable different.

And then for the more synthetic workloads it was just a mix. But overall HAMMER2 was performing well during the initial testing and great to see it continuing to offer noticeable leads in real-world workloads compared to the aging HAMMER file-system. HAMMER2 also offers better clustering, online deduplication, snapshots, compression, encryption, and many other modern file-system features.