Linux 3.11 File-System Performance: EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS

For the final FS-Mark test when dealing with many sub-directories, F2FS is still the fastest on the i7-4770K + Vertex 3 SSD configuration, but its performance is down compared to Linux 3.9.

The FS-Mark performance goes up slightly on Linux 3.11 over Linux 3.10 for F2FS while there isn't much change out of the other tests. F2FS is still the fastest performer but its numbers are too good and looks like there may be some synchronizing issues with the file-system.

Aside from Btrfs being slower, the EXT4 and F2FS and XFS file-systems performed at close to the same speed for the compile test in CompileBench.

For the initial create task in Compile Bench, EXT4 was the fastest on Linux 3.11. However, the EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-systems dropped in speed on Linux 3.11 over Linux 3.10. There's a noticeable slowdown for those three file-systems while Btrfs was a hair bit faster.

Overall, EXT4 is still performing the best "out of the box" (with stock mount options) when testing the four leading Linux file-systems on a single SSD drive with the Linux 3.11 kernel. F2FS does have some wins, but in at least some tests it doesn't appear to be always ensuring the data is syncing to the disk as with the other file-systems, which could potentially put your data at risk in case of a kernel issue or power loss. Coming up next will be tuning benchmarks of Btrfs and F2FS to see what further performance gains can be squeezed.