The Performance Of EXT4 Then & Now

While most of the performance results have been illustrating bad performance drops, there have been some gains. For example, with the PostMark test beginning with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel its performance has improved significantly (2.5x faster) and this continues to be the case even with the very latest (Linux 2.6.33) kernel.

The Dbench test results were nearly the same between the Linux 2.6.28 and 2.6.32 kernels except for some small regressions in the 2.6.32 kernel when running with six and twelve threads. However, with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, clear across the board from 6 to 128 threads with Dbench there are massive improvements in this yet to be formally released kernel.

Similar to the PostMark results, the numbers for AIO-Stress also improved quite nicely with its random write performance beginning with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.