Re: [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] A common project for file system performance testing

[Johannes Thumshirn <Johannes.Thumshirn@wdc.com>]

On 2/12/26 2:42 PM, Hans Holmberg wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to propose a topic on file system benchmarking:
>
> Can we establish a common project(like xfstests, blktests) for
> measuring file system performance? The idea is to share a common base
> containing peer-reviewed workloads and scripts to run these, collect and
> store results.
>
> Benchmarking is hard hard hard, let's share the burden!

Definitely I'm all in!

> A shared project would remove the need for everyone to cook up their
> own frameworks and help define a set of workloads that the community
> cares about.
>
> Myself, I want to ensure that any optimizations I work on:
>
> 1) Do not introduce regressions in performance elsewhere before I
>     submit patches
> 2) Can be reliably reproduced, verified, and regression‑tested by the
>     community
>
> The focus, I think, would first be on synthetic workloads (e.g. fio)
> but it could expanded to running application and database workloads
> (e.g. RocksDB).
>
> The fsperf[1] project is a python-based implementation for file system
> benchmarking that we can use as a base for the discussion.
> There are probably others out there as well.
>
> [1] https://github.com/josefbacik/fsperf

I was about to mention Josef's fsperf project. We also used to have some 
sort of a dashboard for fsperf results for BTRFS, but that vanished 
together with Josef.

A common dashboard with per workload statistics for different 
filesystems would be a great thing to have, but for that to work, we'd 
need different hardware and probably the vendors of said hardware to buy 
in into it.

For developers it would be a benefit to see eventual regressions and 
overall weak points, for users it would be a nice tool to see what FS to 
pick for what workload.

BUT someone has to do the job setting everything up and maintaining it.


Byte,

     Johannes