The Performance Of EXT4 Then & Now

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 19 January 2010 at 07:17 AM EST. Page 5 of 6. 42 Comments.

With the two FS-Mark tests we used, there was not much change at all between the Linux 2.6.28 and 2.6.33 kernels in terms of EXT4 performance changes.

EXT4 developers have previously said that some of the performance drops that have occurred with EXT4 can be erased if mounting the file-system with the nobarrier mount option. However, kernel developers only recommend using this option if you have no write cache or if the system is safely backed up on battery power, as if the system fails you are likely to lose your recent data. So we did do just that and ran the same set of tests and compared the Linux 2.6.33-rc4 results with that kernel again but when the only change was mounting the EXT4 file-system with the nobarrier mount option added. It ended up improving things for just four of the tests.

With Dbench when running the EXT4 file-system with the no barrier option the speed had improved significantly, but again the data is being put at greater risk of loss in the event of a system lock-up or power failure.


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