Metadata Performance of Four Linux File Systems

“The previous article made several observations about
benchmarking, one of which is that storage and file system
benchmarks seldom, if ever, explain why they are performing a
benchmark. This is a point that is not to be underestimated.
Specifically, if the reason why the benchmark was performed can not
be adequately explained, then the benchmark itself becomes suspect
(it may just be pure marketing material).

“Given this point, the reason the benchmark in this article is
being performed is to examine or explore if, and possibly how much,
difference there is between the metadata performance of four Linux
file systems using a single metadata benchmark. The search is not
to find which file system is the best because it is a single
benchmark, fdtree. Rather it is to search for differences and
contrast the metadata performance of the file systems.

“Why is examining the metadata performance a worthwhile
exploration? Glad that you asked. There are a number of
applications, workloads, and classes of applications that are
metadata intensive. Mail servers can be very metadata intensive
applications because of the need to read and write very small
files. Sometimes databases have workloads that do a great deal of
reading and writing small files. In the world of technical
computing, many bioinformatic applications such as gene sequencing
applications, do a great deal of small reads and writes.”

Complete
Story