10-Way Linux File-System Comparison On Linux 3.10

EXT4 fell back when dealing with more files and spread throughout many sub-directories for FS-Mark with F2FS being the fastest followed by the obsolete EXT2 file-system. XFS and Btrfs were running at roughly the same speed as JFS. ZFS and ReiserFS continued to be among the slowest file-systems.

When running Dbench across the ten file-systems on the stable Linux 3.10 kernel, F2FS, EXT2, and JFS were the fastest performers, but they are too fast for this Intel SATA-based SSD and not writing out all of the data to the disk. For the file-systems that were synchronizing to the disk, Btrfs was the fastest followed by EXT4 and ZFS.

Reiser4 had another surprise win, this time for the compile test within CompileBench. The Reiser4 performance was followed by EXT4 and XFS. JFS, F2FS, and ZFS were the slowest for this particular workload.

Lastly, for the Compile Bench Initial Create test case, EXT3 was the fastest followed by the EXT4 and Reiser4. As you can see from the results though, for these ten Linux file-systems the performance is quite mixed depending upon the particular workload. There's also a lot more to consider when evaluating a file-system for production use beyond just the raw performance.