HAMMER2 File-System Performance On DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 having a lot of HAMMER2 file-system work on top of all of the changes introduced by DragonFlyBSD 5.4 at the start of December, here is a fresh look at the HAMMER versus HAMMER2 file-system performance on this BSD operating system.

Using an Intel Core i9 7960X test system with Intel 800p 128GB NVMe SSD, fresh benchmarks were carried out of DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 when installed with a root HAMMER file-system and again with the latest HAMMER2 file-system option that has matured quite nicely over the DragonFlyBSD 5.x releases.

This quick testing is just looking at the HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 file-system performance. Besides the performance, HAMMER2 offers a lot of features not found in the original HAMMER design. The latest HAMMER2 design information can be found here.

All of these BSD storage benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.

SQLite was operating much faster with HAMMER2.


BlogBench that simulates the web server workload of running a web blog was yielding reads much faster on HAMMER2 but writes were faster with HAMMER1.

The CompileBench compile task was much faster on HAMMER2.

But in the I/O heavier initial create process, the original HAMMER was faster as of DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1.


HAMMER2 was faster for PostgreSQL with both reads and writes.



The FIO synthetic tests didn't yield much of a difference except for 4K sequential writes being faster.

More tests, including a comparison against FreeBSD with ZFS, coming up as we get ready for more exciting benchmarks in 2019.