The benchmark with many more metrics: https://www.phoronix.com/review/bcachefs-linux-67
Edit: The benchmarks were done with a debug variable set, which explains the weak IO.
I think it’s not btrfs that’s slow, it’s bcachefs that’s insanely fast. Bcachefs almost as fast as ext4 while having that many features is insane.
This screenshot is the only metric where btrfs is incredibly slow.
Bcachefs random and sequential writes and reads are much slower than other filesystems in this benchmark.
I have no idea how the actual real world performance will be. Bcachefs still misses a lot of features so I’ll continue to follow the development, hopefully including performance improvements.
Bcachefs sequential write performance in this out-of-the-box comparison was coming in at around half the speed of Btrfs while XFS, F2FS, and EXT4 were the fastest.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/bcachefs-linux-67/2
Edit: The benchmarks were done with a debug variable set, which explains the weak IO.
Wait, so the benchmarks mostly contradict claims that bcachefs is almost as fast as ext4 except in application startup time? What kind of test performed for that application startup time benchmark?
The application startup test is designed to cold-load an application with heavy background IO going on.
“Why does btrfs get a huge perf hit with background IO work?”
I’ve noticed a lot number of questions on reddit/etc. suddenly gets asked in that way (“why” in front of a statement). As an ESL I was confused for a while because I’ve been drilled in asking questions using auxiliary verbs.
I blame explanatory headlines. If you searched “why does [blank] happen?” you’d get articles like “why [blank] happens.” ESL speakers (and under-educated native speakers) bungle the difference. (They’re already trying to solve some technical crap. Their [blank] stopped working.) As this spreads, reddit and Stack Overflow start displacing tech-support blogs, and suddenly the headlines themselves are wrong.
Seems unreasonably slow to me that xterm would take a second to start. My two computers running kernel 6.7 are slow than the machine in the test, both have BTRFS on LUKS.
I tried a cold start of xterm on my older thinkpad with an NVMe drive at ~0.3s.
A cold start on my desktop (also NVMe), 0.08s.
I’m unable to reproduce. I wonder if he might’ve had a fresh install with some background operations grinding on, or some indexing going on.
What background IO load did you run?
I was torrenting porn with good speed.
Incidentally
Thanks for sharing!
Yeah; my somewhat up-to-date thinkbook with NVMe drive cold boots to Cinnamon desktop in under 8 seconds, terminal window opens in the blink of an eye. BTRFS is not without its problems, but they’re more along the lines of specific RAID configs not being what you’d wish for; I’ve never heard a complaint about speed before, and I’ve never had that problem myself.
Would like to see how much the background work is impacted over time. Seems like a scheduling issue to me
Hold up. I thought btrfs was better than ext4?
Filesystems aren’t so simple. Modern advanced filesystems like btrfs, zfs and bcachefs are more than just filesystems.
E.g. they include features like volume management, compression and sometimes encryption. Most features can also be achieved with for example ext4 + lvm + luks, but it’s nice to have all in one system with unified configuration.
tl;dr
Btrfs does more than ext4, which can have a negative performance impact, depending on the use case/metric. Usually the features gained by btrfs outweigh the small difference in performance imo.
Oh. So I didn’t need LVM and LUKS at my install?
Btrfs doesn’t do encryption, so luks is still necessary. LVM isn’t needed since btrfs subvolumes achieve the same in a more flexible way (no fixed size, snapshots).
Btrfs doesn’t have built in encryption, if you want to encrypt Btrfs you still need another layer (e.g. LUKS).
It’s mostly better, but not in every way. It has a lot of useful features, at a performance cost sometimes. A cost that historically wasn’t a problem with spinning hard drives and relatively slow SATA SSDs but will show up more on really fast NVMes.
The snapshots, it has to keep track of what’s been modified. Depending on the block size, an update of just a couple bytes can end up as a few 4k write because it’s Copy-on-Write and it has to update a journal and it has to update the block list of the file. But at the same time, copying a 50GB file is instantaneous on btrfs because of the same CoW feature. Most people find the snapshots more useful than eeking out every last bit of performance out of your drive.
Even ZFS, often considered to be the gold standard of filesystems, is actually kinda slow. But its purpose isn’t to be the fastest, its purpose is throwing an array of 200 drives at it and trusting it to protect you even against some media degradation and random bit flips in your storage with regular scrubs.
I’m sure this is a specific workload that BTRFS struggles with that others handle just fine.
Other workloads BTRFS will be better, and in others it will be worse. There’s no one size fits all.
There are many other considerations besides startup speed, no? Filesystem reliability is a big one, and all the scrubbing and defragging features of btrfs are pretty neat
Valve decided on Ext4 for Steam Deck and did so probably not just for shits and giggles.
I was curious about this too. Definitely making me question some of my own thoughts and assumptions about btrfs.
It’s a single metric out of many for a file system, let’s see if someone investigates.
It probably has to do with the CoW nature of BTRFS compared to the others which don’t do CoW.
Bcachefs does use CoW iirc~
It does, it says so in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article
Ah, BCacheFS is also a lot less of a clusterfuck then BTRFS is too
