FreeBSD ZFS vs. TrueOS ZoF vs. DragonFlyBSD HAMMER2 vs. ZFS On Linux Benchmarks

With TrueOS offering daily snapshots built against the "ZFS on FreeBSD" code derived from OpenZFS / ZFS on Linux, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how the performance compares to that of FreeBSD 12.0 with its ZFS file-system support, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 with its HAMMER2 file-system alternative, and then Linux with ZFS/ZoL and other file-system options.

The latest TrueOS ZFSonFreeBSD daily snapshot as of this week was freshly installed and benchmarked. Following that was a FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE install with its ZFS file-system support followed by DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 with its HAMMER2 file-system. On the Linux side there was an Ubuntu 19.04 daily snapshot running with its EXT4 file-system, Ubuntu 19.04 tested then with ZFS (ZFS On Linux) as shipped in the Disco archive, and Ubuntu 19.04 with the SSD-optimized F2FS. A run with Intel's Clear Linux using its EXT4 file-system was done as an additional data point for reference on that performance-optimized Linux platform.

Throughout all testing the same system was used (obviously) and consisted of an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 system with 32GB of RAM and a 256GB Toshiba RD400 NVMe solid-state drive. Each operating system was tested in its out-of-the-box/default configuration except where otherwise noted. All of these storage benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.