On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 03:51:17PM +0200, Swâmi Petaramesh wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> I don't trust theoretical benchmarks that much and prefer "real-life
> benchs" on the occasion, so here's mine:
> 
> Given 4 laptops, the most powerful of which was running BTRFS and
> the others ext3 or ext4, all machines running Ubuntu 11.04 Natty
> 32-bit with a stock Ubuntu 2.6.38-11 kernel, all machines were given
> the following FS-intensive task :
> 
> - Upgrade O.S. from Ubuntu 11.04 Natty to 11.10 Oneiric (beta),
> using a local packages apt-cacher.
> 
> Machines :
> 
> 1/ Acer Aspire 3104 WLMi, AMD Sempron Mobile 3500+ @1.8 GHz, 1.5 GB
> RAM, 80 GB SATA HD, ext4 over standard partitions
> 
> 2/ Asus EeePC 1005PE, Intel Atom N450 @1.66 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB
> SATA HD, ext3 over AES-128 encrypted LVM
> 
> 3/ Compaq Mini CQ10-740SF, Intel Atom N455 @1.66 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 250
> GB SATA HD, ext4 over standard partitions
> 
> 4/ Dell XPS M1330, Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 @2.5 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 B
> SATA HD, BTRFS over AES-128 encrypted LVM
> 
> Results :
> 
> All 3 ext3 /  ext4 machines took between 60 and 90 minutes to
> complete their upgrade.
> 
> BTRFS machine took 20 HOURS so far, still counting (ETA 15 minutes left).
> 
> Wow. Impressive.

   That's because dpkg is known for using (f)sync very heavily.  btrfs
honours the sync request in all cases, so it's much much slower than
ext3, which doesn't. There's an LD_PRELOAD library called "eatmydata"
that you can use to paper over the issue by running it as a wrapper
around dpkg.

   Hugo.

-- 
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