Comparison of Journalling Filesystems

[John H. Robinson, IV]

i did a small bit of research, to find a good article comparing the
different journalling filesystems available for Linux,

http://bulmalug.net/body.phtml?nIdNoticia=1154

the article is in english, even if a lot of it looks like it is español

Performance and Conclusions

  Different benchmarks (see Resources below) have shown that XFS and
  ReiserFS have a very good performance compared to the well-tested and
  optimised Ext2. Ext3 showed that is slower but getting closer to Ext2
  performance. We expect that the performance will improve considerably
  over the following months. On the other hand, JFS get the worst
  results in all benchmarks, not only in performance but it had also
  some stability problems in the Linux port.

  XFS, ReiserFS and Ext3 have demonstrated they are excellent and
  reliable file systems. There is an important area where XFS has higher
  performance: I/O operation on large files, specially compared to its
  closer competitor, ReiserFS. This is understandable and subjected to
  change over the time, ReiserFS uses the 2.4 generic read and write
  Linux, while XFS has ported sophisticated IRIX I/O operations to
  Linux, the most important is the extent based allocation and direct
  I/O operations. Furthermore, the current version of ReiserFS does a
  complete tree traversal for every 4 KB block it writes, and then
  inserts one pointer at a time, which introduces an important overhead
  of balancing the tree while it copies data around.

  For operation on small files, normally between 100 and 10.000 bytes,
  ReiserFS has shown that has the best results, if the affected files
  are not in the cache yet (as occurs during booting). In case you are
  reading files that are already cached in RAM, the difference is almost
  negligible for Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS and XFS.

  Among all journal file systems, ReiserFS is the only one that is
  included in the standard Linus tree since 2.4.1 and SuSE supports it
  for more than two years now. However, Ext3 is going the be the
  standard file system for Red Hat and XFS is being used in large
  servers, specially in the Hollywood industry, due mainly to the
  influence of SGI in that market. IBM has to put a lot of efforts on
  JFS in they want to see it in the mainstream, although is a valid
  alternative for migrating AIX and OS/2 installation to Linux.


-john