On journaling file systems in Linux : an empirical study

Abstract EN

This paper takes an in-depth study and performance evaluation of four journaling file systems in Linux : Ext3, JFS, ReiserFS, and XFS.

We evaluate these file systems using benchmarks to characterize their behavior toward different tasks handled by the file systems.

We evaluate these file systems currently available as is and without any performance tuning or patching.

The results of our benchmarks show that none of the four journaling file systems clearly offers a better overall performance.

For sequential reading and writing, XFS is, in order of magnitude, faster than the other systems.

For random access and seek operations, Reiser FS and JFS provide faster rates than the others.

When it comes to creating and deleting files, Ext3 performs well for a small number of files while Reiser FS does better for a larger number of files.