What filesystem is currently best for a single nvme drive with regard to performance read/write as well as stability/no file loss? ext4 seems very old, btrfs is used by RHEL, ZFS seems to be quite good… what do people tend to use nowadays? What is an arch users go-to filesystem?

  • exi@feddit.de
    01·
    1 year ago

    If you are planning to have any kind of database with regular random writes, stay away from btrfs. It’s roughly 4-5x slower than zfs and will slowly fragment itself to death.

    I’m migrating a server from btrfs to zfs right now for this very reason. I have multiple large MySQL and SQLite tables on it and they have accumulated >100k file fragments each and have become abysmally slow. There are lots of benchmarks out there that show that zfs does not have this issue and even when both filesystems are clean, database performance is significantly higher on zfs.

    If you don’t want a COW filesystem, then XFS on LVM raid for databases or ext4 on LVM for everything else is probably fine.

    • Laser@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      Did you disable CoW for your database with btrfs? E.g. for PostgreSQL, the Arch Wiki states:

      If the database resides on a Btrfs file system, you should consider disabling Copy-on-Write for the directory before creating any database.

      • exi@feddit.de
        01·
        1 year ago

        From arch wiki:

        Disabling CoW in Btrfs also disables checksums. Btrfs will not be able to detect corrupted nodatacow files. When combined with RAID 1, power outages or other sources of corruption can cause the data to become out of sync.

        No thanks