Filesystems: Data Preservation, fsync, and Benchmarks Pt. 2

"As Theodore Ts'o blog advocates using fsync(2) to get around the rename issue on ext4, one would imagine that it performs much better on ext4 than ext3. And that leads us to the second part of the article: benchmarks! What price is there to be paid for fsync(2) in different scenarios on different filesystems.

"I'll test not only ext3 and ext4 but also XFS, JFS and Reiserfs. You will notice two benchmarks for XFS, one with the default options and one with the nobarrier mount option. By default XFS uses block layer write barriers which can make some operations much slower. There is also a barrier mount option for ext3 which is off by default. For ext4 barriers are on by default. Unfortunately I'm unsure if this barrier option is comparing apples with apples across these two filesystems though. As btrfs is still so young I decided to omit it from the benchmarks."

Complete Story

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