Some DragonFly HAMMER2 / FreeBSD ZFS / Linux EXT4 Benchmarks

With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.

Complementing my earlier HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 benchmarks, I ran a set of I/O tests on TrueOS and FreeBSD 11.1 as well as Ubuntu and Clear Linux. All tests were done using the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with 256GB Toshiba RD400 NVMe SSD, same default CPU clock frequencies, etc.

Here's some preliminary quick numbers when just looking strictly at the out-of-the-box file-system performance on each of the tested operating systems. Take the numbers as you wish.

HAMMER2 does seem much faster for SQLite, assuming the fsync behavior is behaving correctly...

The Dbench test does raise some questions given the big difference on DragonFlyBSD compared to the others.


While under Compile Bench, DragonFly comes in at the bottom end.

The simple PostMark test mostly relies upon the file-system's fsync performance.

The PostgreSQL performance does report in as faster on DragonFly with HAMMER2.

While Linux distributions with EXT4 were slightly quicker with this Git benchmark measuring the time needed to run some common Git commands on a large repository.

OSBench didn't run on all operating systems due to its Meson build requirements, but here are those synthetic test numbers for those interested.

More data is available from this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Some broader and more thorough BSD vs. Linux fresh benchmarks coming in a few days.