Linux 5.0 File-System Benchmarks: Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS

For the basic SQLite benchmark, to no surprise Btrfs with its default CoW behavior led to by far the slowest performance on all three drives. The fastest for the SATA/USB tests was XFS followed quickly by EXT4 and then F2FS. In the case of the Intel 900p SSD, the XFS results were too fast to accurately measure while EXT4 and F2FS took just two seconds to complete while Btrfs took six seconds.

With 4K random reads by FIO, the SATA/USB performance was flat across the tested file-systems while XFS had a narrow lead on the Optane SSD followed by F2FS and then EXT4 while Btrfs was in a distant last place.

For sequential reads, XFS/F2FS/EXT4 continued offering similar performance across the tested storage configurations.

The sequential write performance wasn't really exciting besides EXT4 coming in slightly lower on the high-end Optane SSD wand Btrfs running abnormally slow with the USB storage.