Not unexpected

Posted Jan 20, 2012 23:41 UTC (Fri) by dcg (subscriber, #9198)
Parent article: XFS: the filesystem of the future?

I find the claims of better performance over Ext4 surprising - the overall better performance of XFS had always been a given, or so I thought.

I will play the devil's advocate here: that Ext4 has improved so much in the last years in data-oriented workloads (and despite of the huge shortcomings in the Ext design!), says a lot of good things about Ext.

Not unexpected

Posted Jan 21, 2012 1:04 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

XFS has been ahead of ext* for many workloads for a long time, but not for all. In general the more drives you had on a system, and the larger the files, the more likely it was that XFS would be ahead. It's been slower in dealing with lots of small files on a single drive.

that being said, you really do need to test your workload on various filesystems. I've done testing that has shown a 4x performance difference between ext2 and ext3 on a particular workload (fsync heavy small writes, ext2 was the clear winner), so it may not be what you expect.

As filesystems get more complex, the 'best' filesystem for a particular use case will not always be the same one.