FreeBSD ZFS vs. ZoL Performance, Ubuntu ZFS On Linux Reference

With the basic but common SQLite embedded database test case, FreeBSD with the experimental ZoL ZFS file-system support delivered a nice performance improvement compared to the current ZFS implementation, which performed similar to the Ubuntu 18.04 ZoL support. Ubuntu 18.04 with EXT4 was the slowest. There wasn't a FreeBSD UFS result due to that test running sub-one second, likely due to UFS not syncing to disk properly like the other file-systems.

BlogBench, the simulated workload for running a web blog server, saw FreeBSD ZoL read performance also improving compared to the current Illumos-based ZFS implementation. The Ubuntu performance in this test was much lower.

But when it came to the BlogBench write performance, Ubuntu 18.04 now was much faster with EXT4 leading the way. Fortunately though on the FreeBSD front, the ZoL code was faster than the existing ZFS support. In both BlogBench runs, FreeBSD on ZFS was outperforming UFS.