Comments on Tsuna's blog: ext4 2x faster than XFS?

I recently experienced the same as I did a deboots...

2011-12-02T13:27:29.389-08:00

I recently experienced the same as I did a debootstrap on a simple USB stick with 1 GB. The debootstrap took with xfs about 10 minuted and with ext4 about 3 or 4 minutes. After then I did some testing with my workstation and notebook and in any case ext4 was much faster. I used a 2.6.32 debian squeeze kernel.
I was suprised by this and changed to ext4 everywhere, although I'm a big fan of XFS.

The "delaylog" mount option for XFS in t...

2011-10-24T19:55:20.287-07:00

The "delaylog" mount option for XFS in the later kernels increases small file proformance and is the default mount option in kernel 3.0 or higher.

I was able to squeeze a bit more performance out o...

2011-09-27T04:21:43.760-07:00

I was able to squeeze a bit more performance out of XFS by disabling Hyperthreading (It doesn't look like that would apply to you) and by using the noop scheduler instead of deadline. Only anecdotal at this point, but I thought I would pass it on. I'm also running Lucid.

Not sure how I missed that one. Thanks!

2011-09-26T09:18:54.074-07:00

Not sure how I missed that one. Thanks!

The sysbench command along with the raw sysbench o...

2011-09-26T09:09:54.623-07:00

The sysbench command along with the raw sysbench outputs are all available under the subdirectories of http://tsunanet.net/~tsuna/benchmarks/ext4-xfs-raid10/

Can you post the actual sysbench command that you ...

2011-09-26T04:49:48.180-07:00

Can you post the actual sysbench command that you used so I can attempt to verify your results on my local installation?

In my experience with many many kernels in around ...

2011-09-14T08:24:06.206-07:00

In my experience with many many kernels in around 2.6.32 and earlier, XFS has worse performance than ext4 when both filesystems are used with defaults.

I'm also puzzled by the small performance gain when specifying sunit/swidth for my RAID array. I expected it would make a bigger difference. I'm guessing that something is causing misaligned accesses, but I can't see why, since I don't use a partition table (which seems to be a common cause of alignment issues).

Unfortunately the FAQ – which I read already – isn't very precise. It's not easy to tune something when there's no rule of thumb to orient you in the search space of tuning parameters. I can't do a brute-force search because each benchmark of each individual combination of parameter changes takes too long to run.

In absence of indications to the contrary, we
2011-09-14T07:35:00.545-07:00
In absence of indications to the contrary, we recommend the defaults

I don't know how hard it'd be to test something upstream for comparison, but it might be interesting. A lot has changed in both filesystems since those days, and to be honest I have no idea what filesystem code is in that Ubuntu kernel.

@Eric yes it's the kernel that comes with Ubun...

2011-09-13T22:13:37.747-07:00

@Eric yes it's the kernel that comes with Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS (2.6.32-21-server).

So how do you guys recommend logbsize and logbufs to be tuned? What's the rule? I couldn't find anything on Google other than people using logbufs=8,logbsize=256k with no explanation whatsoever.

I'm curious - which "2.6.32" did you...

2011-09-13T14:03:30.412-07:00

I'm curious - which "2.6.32" did you test? Sounds like a good chance it's a distro kernel. :)

I assume he means try those mount options for tuni...

2011-09-13T13:41:24.962-07:00

I assume he means try those mount options for tuning.

Also I would try a newer kernel, lots of changes in XFS and EXT4 since 2.6.32. http://sandeen.net/wordpress/?p=532

That's kinda terse... What do you mean more p...

2011-09-13T11:58:19.816-07:00

That's kinda terse... What do you mean more precisely?

logbsize and logbufs

2011-09-13T11:25:01.348-07:00

logbsize and logbufs