Metadata performance is perhaps the most neglected facet of storage performance. In previous articles we've looked into how best to improve metadata performance without too much luck. Could that be a function of the benchmark? Hmmm...

More performance: We add five file systems to our previous benchmark results to creating a “uber” article on metadata file system performance. We follow the “good” benchmarking guidelines presented in a previous article and examine the good, the bad and the interesting.

Turning from Metadata performance to throughput performance, we examines the impact of journal size on ext4 when the journal is disk-based. Dig into the numbers and see what you can do to improve throughput performance.

Previously, we examined the impact of journal size using a separate disk on metadata performance as measured by fdtree. In this follow-up we repeat the same test but use a ramdisk for the journal, thereby boosting the best performance. Or does it?

Over the past week there has been a lot of talk about the EXT4 file-system following the announcement that Google is migrating their EXT2 file-systems to EXT4. Their reasons for this transition to EXT4 are attributed to the easy migration process and Google engineers are pleased with this file-system's performance.

Using the principles of good benchmarking, we explore the metadata performance of four linux file systems using a simple benchmark, fdtree.

In recent history, journaling file systems were viewed as an oddity and thought of primarily in terms of research. But today, a journaling file system (ext3) is the default in Linux®. Discover the ideas behind journaling file systems, and learn how they provide better integrity in the face of a power failure or system crash. Learn about the various journaling file systems in use today, and peek into the next generation of journaling file systems.

"We're now within striking distance of XFS, and there’s more improvements to ext4 which I have planned that should help its performance even further. This is the kind of performance improvement that I’m totally psyched to see!"

The default journaling file system on non-boot partitions on Ubuntu 11.04 is ext4. Other journaling file systems supported are ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs, and btrfs. The journaling file system of interest in this article is btrfs, the B-Tree File System. Btrfs is an ongoing attempt to create a ZFS-like file system for Linux.