Where The Btrfs Performance Is At Today

With the Flexible IO Tester, Btrfs was faster than EXT4 with each using their default mount options by a difference of 31%. This lead expanded to 64% with the compression support.

With the Threaded I/O Tester when doing 32 Threads of 64MB random writes, Btrfs averaged out to 36MB/s while EXT4 was at 41MB/s, but this increased to 48MB/s with the zlib file-system compression.

EXT4 was handily faster than Btrfs with the PostMark benchmark while using the file-system compression led to no change in performance for this Linux disk test.

Aside from the Apache and PostgreSQL tests where Btrfs is no threat to EXT4, the performance of this advanced file-system with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel on an Intel solid-state drive is quite good. Btrfs had won a number of the synthetic disk benchmarks and in cases where it did not win its performance was usually just under EXT4. Using the zlib compression also was of tremendous benefit in many areas except when using the no data copy-on-write feature with zlib usually led to a performance drop. Besides its performance, Btrfs is an interesting file-system for its advanced feature-set and abilities, such as file-system snapshots and subvolumes, which allows for other interesting opportunities like Linux system rollback support.