Filesystem performance and scalability in Linux 2.4.17

Ray Bryant, Ruth Forester, John Hawkes

Abstract

The Linux kernel is unique in that it supports a wide variety of high-quality filesystems. For server systems, the most commonly used are Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, XFS and JFS. This paper compares the performance of these filesystems using Linux 2.4.17 and three benchmarks: pgmeter, an open source implementation of the Intel Iometer benchmark; filemark (a version of postmark); and AIM Benchmark Suite VII. The benchmarks were run on three different systems ranging in size from a contemporary single-user workstation to a 28-processor ccNUMA machine. Although the best-performing filesystem varies depending on the benchmark and system used, some larger trends are evident in the data. On the smaller systems, the best-performing file system is often Ext2, Ext3 or ReiserFS. For the larger systems and higher loads, XFS can provide the best overall performance.