Linux filesystem performance tested

Formula Storage

Article from ADMIN 10/2012

By Michael Kromer

Choosing the right filesystem for a particular job can be a difficult task. We tested seven candidates and found some interesting results to make an administrator's choice easier.

Admins building a new server or setting up a new storage device have to make important decisions on the basis of predicted usage. Does the server need to write millions of files quickly to keep the backup window manageable, or does it need to deliver multiple-gigabyte virtualization images within seconds?

The choice of filesystem can make a huge difference in such cases, so Linux Magazine put seven filesystems through numerous tests. The results of the benchmarks in this article could help readers choose the most appropriate filesystem for the task at hand.

The tests were performed on a Transtec Calleo appliance (see the "Test Hardware" box) with eight fast disks in a RAID level 0 array with a stripe size of 64KB. The RAID is divided into an SSD array and an HDD array with identical partitions on both arrays, thus also taking partition alignment [2], which is relevant for the hard disk's performance, into account. The partition, therefore, starts at LBA address 2048.

Test Hardware

Device: Transtech Lynx Calleo Application Server 2260 [1]: CPU/RAM: Intel Xeon E5-2643 (quad-core CPU, eight threads, 3.3GHz)/32GB RAM (DDR-3, 1600MHz, ECC)

Controller: LSI Logic Mega RAID SAS 9261-8i PCIe x8, 512MB cache

SSD/Hard disks: two SATA-II Intel SSD 710 Series (100GB)/six SAS Toshiba MK2001TRKB 6GBps (2TB)

Network: 4x Intel (IGB) 1Gbps

Operating system: openSUSE 12.1 and Tumbleweed, kernel 3.1.10 and 3.3.6 (5-12-2012)

Filesystems and versions: ext2, ext3, ext4 (each with e2fsprogs 1.41.14), Btrfs (btrfsprogs 0.19), XFS (xfsprogs 3.1.6), ReiserFS (3.6.21), ZFS (0.6.0-rc8).