A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]

A short history of btrfs

Posted Jul 23, 2009 14:51 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: A short history of btrfs by jengelh
Parent article: A short history of btrfs

Phoronix's benchmarks appear to consist of 'do random stuff, some of which is real-world, some of which isn't, and take an average to see which is best', apparently in the hope that if they pick enough benchmarks the good ones will exceed the crap ones in number.

i.e. they have iozone benchmarks in there... but then they have compression, and I've seen them look at things like 'how long it takes to boot' and even game frame rates (!?) in filesystem benchmarks before.

So I treat Phoronix benchmarks largely as a source of amusement these days. Sometimes (rarely) they might tell us things we don't already know...

to post comments

A short history of btrfs

Posted Jul 23, 2009 15:26 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

they just announced that they are about to start using a new version of their benchmarks, so this is the perfect time to jump in and try to improve things.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pt...

error bars

Posted Jul 23, 2009 22:11 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

Still no error bars on their charts. Yes, the error bars would probably mean most results found nothing. That's a good thing!

I'd like to see more investigation. I think that would follow from narrowing results down to only those that were significant. If you find 500 tiny differences between two things, most of which are just measurement noise, you have no reason to investigate further. But if you make one big significant finding you can do a whole article about what it means - why is the Frooqux significantly faster ? Is it the same on an AMD machine ? In OpenSolaris ? With a different network card ?

error bars

Posted Jul 23, 2009 22:31 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

you need to tell them, not us ;-)

A short history of btrfs

Posted Jul 24, 2009 7:34 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Hard: I still don't have email thanks to the implosion of Zetnet, sorry, Breathe, sorry, they went bust and cut all their *other* customers off from their IMAP mailservers, the new company is called Breathe now.

Moving to a decent ISP as soon as BT get around to it... but that's a week away, plus another week for the new MX record to propagate around. Three weeks without properly-working email, sigh.

A short history of btrfs

Posted Jul 24, 2009 9:44 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

they do have a comment section on their website