On Sun, 2004-09-12 at 10:10 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 02:31:21 +1000 > James Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Performance wise, I would expect NTFS to > > be faster. > > I don't remember where I read it, but I remember reading that NTFS > significantly slower than EXT2. Not sure about EXT3.
I couldn't find a good reference for speed comparisons between Linux
filesystems and NTFS. I did however find this:
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html
Which is interesting, it shows more fluctuations in the speed of various
linux filesystems than I'd have expected. EXT3 though is shown to be
quite slow on a number of common operations. It is also the filesystem
that took the most time in total of all the filesystems tested. I
suspect that's because it has a full data journal, none of the other
filesystems tested have that. Interestingly, it does seem to corroborate
with what you say -- EXT2 is quite fast on a lot of those tests. EXT3
however, is a different and much slower beast. It is pretty hard to know
for sure with all the hype surrounding Windows technologies but AFAIK,
NTFS is a meta-data only journalling filesystem. I would expect its
performance to be closer to the other meta-data journalled filesystems
in there.
It's an interesting page. It also reminded me of something I'd long
forgotten about -- reiserfs chews CPU time.
My favourite quote from the article:
Both ext versions 2 and 3 seem to reap the benefits of removing
large numbers of files faster than any other file system tested.
right on!
>
> > EXT2/3 pre-date the current balanced tree fad that
> > filesystems are currently going through.
>
> So does NTFS which has been around at least since NT 3.5.
I should have been more specific. What you're saying is exactly right.
However, there have been numerous versions of NTFS. I don't know if
they're backwards compatible or not. Anyway, the current incarnation of
NTFS was the one that shipped with Windows 2000. That places it at
around the same vintage as reiser and co. I suppose ultimately no-one
knows if it's using btrees (or r-trees or whatever) or not because it's
secret and proprietary.
I was also referring to XFS 1.2 and to the current version of reiserfs
(3.6, isn't it?) just in case I was unclear there.
James.
--
James Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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