A Quick Look At EXT4 vs. ZFS Performance On Ubuntu 19.10 With An NVMe SSD

Compiling GCC also ended up being slightly faster when done from the EXT4 file-system compared to ZFS.

SQLite is much faster on EXT4 compared to ZFS tending to be slower with database workloads in its stock configuration.

Apache's Cassandra was also faster with EXT4.

Lastly are some numbers from RocksDB.

At least as far as the out-of-the-box/default performance is concerned and from running tests off a conventional desktop and using a single NVMe solid-state drive, EXT4 was faster than ZFS on Ubuntu 19.10 overall. Granted, ZFS can be extensively tuned and is more catered towards server hardware than desktops, but will be interesting to see Canonical's ZFS play as we approach Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. More Ubuntu 19.10 ZFS benchmarks on more diverse hardware and with other Linux file-systems tested will be en route over the weeks ahead. Of course, for most users they are interested in ZFS for its features as opposed to raw performance.

Ubuntu 19.10 is slated for its official release tomorrow, 17 October.