At this point Ext4 is faster than BTRFS.  Even under Linux 3.8, which saw
significant performance improvements for BTRFS,  Ext4 is still faster,
especially with random file reads.

If you enable LZO compression on btrfs, you will notice a big jump in
performance,  but I don't know what impact that will have on RAID,
snapshots, clones, etc.  Note that only files created after compression is
enabled will be affected,  so it is best to enable this option during
installation. It's smart enough to avoid compressing large binaries.  In
addition to a boost in performance,  I appreciate having a few extra bytes
available on my tiny SSD.  Anyone remember Stacker? Unlike that system,
BTRFS compresses files individually,  and does not use a compressed volume.

Anand.
On 2013-02-18 10:46 AM, "Greg King" <[email protected]> wrote:

> At the last CLUG meeting there was some discussion around btrfs (binary
> tree file system), a copy on write file system that is friendlier towards
> SSDs and enables some great features like snapshots and raid. I decided to
> take it for a spin on my old eeePC 4G. It is one of the original eeePC with
> 512MB RAM and a 4G internal SSD. Linux Mint 13 (Maya) has outgrown the 4G
> internal SSD, so I used an 8G SDHC card for the OS.
>
> Mint/Ubuntu install lets you select the btrfs file system at install time,
>  or you can convert from ext3/4 afterwards. I chose to install with btrfs
> and it worked without issues. There is a harmless bug in one of the startup
> scripts that causes the error message "Sparse file is not allowed" on
> reboots. It can be easily fixed by commenting out the offending check in
> the startup script, or installing /boot on an ext3/4 partition.
>
> So far everything looked great. Then I ran Mint update to bring the OS up
> to current software levels. It ran for about 28 hours! I had previously
> installed Maya on the same system with ext4 and I don't remember how long
> the update took, but it was no more than 2 or 3 hours at most. It appears
> as though btrfs needs lots of resources to perform, although it is promoted
> as higher performance than ext3/4.
>
> I haven't used the system much since the install. Even with  xfce it is
> sluggish but usable. Maya is based on the latest Ubuntu long term support
> 12.04 which has kernel 3.2.0 . btrfs docs recommend the latest kernel
> possible since btrfs is under heavy development.  Both SUSE and Oracle are
> claiming btrfs is ready for production service.
>
> Anyone else have experience with btrfs? How does it perform on more
> capable hardware? Is there a kernel level below which it should be avoided?
>
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