September 2, 2009, 6:23 am
In a previous article, the case was made for how low file system benchmarks have fallen. Benchmarks have become the tool of marketing to the point where they are mere numbers and do not prove of much use. The article reviewed a paper that examined nine years of storage and file system benchmarking and made some excellent observations. The paper also made some recommendations about how to improve benchmarks.
This article isn‚Äôt so much about benchmarks as a product, but rather it is an exploration looking for interesting observations or trends or the lack thereof. In particular this article examines the metadata performance of several Linux file systems using a specific micro-benchmark. Fundamentally this article is really an exploration to understand if there is any metadata performance differences between four Linux file systems (ext3, ext4, btrfs, and nilfs) using a metadata benchmark called fdtree. So now it‚Äôs time to eat our dog food and do benchmarking with the recommendations previously mentioned…
