Mac OS X Filesystem Performance Comparison

These are the results of a series of tests I did using IOZone to determine the performance of various filesystems under Mac OS X. I tested HFS+, HFS+ w/ journaling, HFS, UFS, and Ext2 (alpha driver http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ ). Due to wide variation in the results, I did at least 4 runs of each configuration and then used the best score for each test.

Here is a brief summary of the results (note the charts available on the bottom tabs of each report):

I just got feedback that these results are broken on Mozilla/Netscape browsers. I have now put the original Excel version of the results in the data files directory. Safari and IE work fine, but other browsers are choking. That will teach me to use Microsoft products! Next time it will be straight HTML and charts from GnuPlot....

HFS+ w/ journaling :

Read Chart

Write Char

Slow on small writes (25-28% slower on 4k block writes). Varied on larger block writes
Almost no impact on reads
On both writes and reads sometimes is actually faster than HFS+ w/o journaling (64k block writes are 10-20% faster)

HFS :

Read Chart

Write Chart

Mixed results. Very similar to HFS+
Occasionally up to 10% faster (usually for 64k block writes - seems to be a weakness of HFS+)

UFS :

Read Chart

Write Chart

Much slower on writes (20-30% on most)
Close to HFS+ on small reads, falling beind to >15% slower on large reads

Ext2 :

Read Chart

Write Chart

Slower on writes (5-10% on many, 20-30% on small blocks).
Close on many tests, and slightly ahead in some areas (~15% faster on 512k block reads)
Has not yet been optimized. Could greatly improve after a 1.0 release.

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All of the data files are available.

In doing these tests I developed a perl module to manage multiple runs of tests and compare the conglomerated results. It is available on CPAN as Data::BenchmarkResults, or you can download it directly.

Next on my list is some additional testing with applications such as MySQL. Let me know if you have ideas or suggestions - jasontitus[at]tiltastech.com (have to block the e-mail harvesters...).

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