Linux Gazette has a filesystem benchmark article, linked to from slashdot. The results of the benchmark are very interesting...
It's obvious that some filesystems are better for some things than others, and there isn't a huge winner that does good in everything. However, I was really surprised as to how many benchmarks ReiserFSv4 lost. Reiser4 was slowest for removing lots of files and directories, finding lots of files and directories, and creating and copying files. Granted, some of these are Reiser4 losing by half a second, but other times it's losing by almost 15 seconds (copy a 1 gb file). For me this is interesting simply because of the Reiser4 claim that it's the fastest filesystem around. Of course, we all know lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Of course, I think I trust the benchmarks from LG than from the ReiserFS site :)
Ext2 (the non-journaled FS) kicks everything else's ass a lot for speed, but that's mostly because it's a more simplistic filesystem. For the CPU utilization for the tests JFS looks like it comes out ahead, as it does in the final 'total test time' graph.
Remember the whole 'tools in the toolbox' thing. Course, I'm still not sure what to put as the filesystem for the up-and-coming new ufies.org box... will probably stay with ext3 unless someone has a really good reason to go elsewhere.
Posted by Arcterex at January 06, 2006 10:35 AM
So which are you going with?
I will stick to ReiserFS anyway. Mind you, ReiserFS 4 is not considered stable yet by many respected distros (Gentoo Linux being my choice), so I would expect it to gain in throughput soon enough.
In any case, if you use LVM or EVMS for volume management, and you need to assign disk space dinamically, according to changing needs on a sizeable server installation, your choice should be ReiserFS, since it lets you resize LVM or EVMS "partitions" without rebooting the machine, as opposed to ext3, for instance.
If you need more speed on that kind of installation, then there are other solutions to provide scalability and throughput. Reliability and manageability are, in this case more important.
Reiser is a fast JOURNALING file system, but because it has to write the journal entries before it writes the disk, it can't be as fast as a non-journaling file system.
@George
The thing is the benchmarks show it's not nearly as fast as other journaled filesystems :)
It is worth noting that reiser4 is designed to run on systems with fast CPUs. If you have a PIII 500 then reiser4 is not for you.